Sequential Tart Interview (Part 2)
"TO THE MAXX WITH FOUR WOMEN"
originally posted by Katherine Keller on Sequentialtart.com

Part 2 of Katherine Keller's interview with Sam Kieth, the delightfully self depreciating creator of Four Women, Zero Girl and The Maxx. In this portion of the interview Sam talks about the challenges of his art, what he did with his "missing years" and why he's looking forward to death.

Sam Kieth: I'm thinking about a story involving several couples at various stages in their relationships, and with various age differences. What do you think of that idea?

Sequential Tart: It sounds interesting — to explore how old you are when you first meet shapes your relationship. I mean, my husband is 12 years older than I am.

SK: Well, how old were you when you got together?

ST: I was 22-23. He was in his late middle 30s.

SK: And you two have been together all this time?

ST: We broke up briefly, but we never lost contact with each other, and we've been together ever since. Amongst our friends we get quite a bit of ribbing about the age difference. A couple years ago, Ralph's friends sang this at his birthday party, "Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, when you hit puberty, your girlfriend was two."

SK: And you guys are pretty okay with it?

ST: Yeah.

SK: Did you feel a little ... young?

ST: Well, it was kind of awkward introducing him to my parents, I will tell you that.

SK: Really?

ST: Explaining, "There's this guy who's 12 years older than I am ..."

SK: Did you have any conversations where you feel you had to tell them you were mature enough?

ST: No, but it was kind of strange bringing home a guy who was more than a decade older than I was. I was so worried that my parents would think the wrong thing before they got to meet Ralph, that I had hooked up with some kind of Svengali or something like that.

SK: So, it was mostly external things ...

ST: Yeah, I guess so. We get along okay because we pretty much like the same music, and the same kind of art, and the same kind of comics. But then there are times that my husband will make '70s references and I'll say, "Huh?" because I have no idea what he's just talked about.

SK: [Laughs] Wait, how old are you now?

ST: I'm 28.

SK: Oh, you sound more mature than that. Uh, not that I'd really know what any specific age would sound like ... so, he'll clock back to '70s things and you're lost.

ST: Yes. I remember bits of things from '78 forward because that's when I started Kindergarten, but barely.

SK: Sorry to get so off track. I haven't even put this other idea on paper, but I was just probably unfortunately wasting tape and just thinking out loud.

In some ways I think it's probably better not to try and do an age difference story. I think about all the people who have had a great story and they wanted to tell it; often times it just winds up being terrible, like Barry Levinson with Toys, or Martin Scorsese with Last Temptation. They think "I must tell this story!" Like Francis Ford Coppela wants to make Once In the Heart. This whole, "I must do this! I must tell this story!" And the world just says, "Ehhh?" The thing you feel the most passionately about isn't necessarily the thing you do the best. I'd probably screw it up for wanting it to be too perfect.

My wife is always saying, "You're trying to look for social approval for something in this story. I think you're thinking the world will accept this in a way, but ultimately, (a) half of them won't accept this no matter what we do, and (b) you won't feel any better because you're trying to solve something personally through something that's a story."

ST: She's right.

SK: She's always right.

So, that would play into it. I was thinking about trying to go back and stick with things that are maybe not quite so charged.

[Laughs] But, getting back to your simple, blooming question, that I completely got off the track of ... all it needs is a simple little answer, but I don't do that, do I? "Gee, Sam, you write this female character; you've reversed the sex. What's the deal with that? How do you think that changed it?"

Well, I'm really uncomfortable with male characters and male perspectives.

ST: Why do you think that is?

SK: Because I'm fucked up. [Laughs] I don't know, Katherine, that's the 64 thousand dollar question.

The gender I am — in some ways, I'm incredibly male, and in other ways I grew up in a house with a very strong, dominant female — my mom — not that my dad wasn't strong, too, but they split up when I was young and I lived with her and very quickly was handed off to my wife. [Laughs] "Handed off ..." sounds like a stick in a relay race. But at the same time my mom was a bit bitter; my wife was a bit better about trying to let me grow up into who I was. It's always this thing, this ambivalence I have about powerful women, but clearly I surround myself with them, and clearly I respect and respond to them. Yet, I'm also a bit fearful, I think mostly of my dependency on them.

[Laughs] This is turning into a giant therapy session. "Stuff I didn't need to know about you, Sam."

ST: Okay, if you want to move on to another topic ....

SK: Actually, this is fine to talk about. I feel I'd rather be talking about it with a magazine that specializes with women and comics. A lot of times you [ST] talk to creators, like Brian Bendis for instance, and very often the questions are just typical questions that have nothing to do with male vs. female characters. It's one thing if you're talking with a female creator that's writing females, but I think it's a valid question, "What's up, Monkey Boy? Why are you so stuck on women? Why are you always trying to hide and write the women characters? When are you going to get the guts to come out and actually write a man character?"

I have a ... knee jerk affection ... for women characters. [Pause] You can even argue it's not even flattering in a way. In a way it's protection on to the female character of attributes that may not even be true, do you know what I mean? Like romanticizing them, or thinking of them as more sympathetic or easy to write in a way that they're more complex and multi faceted than I should be thinking they are.

ST: But you have written male characters, I mean, there's Legs.

SK: Well ... for example, Amy's fixation with Tim has always been very difficult for me because she's the interesting character for me. She's the one I can pour my self into. I found myself thinking, "Why does she even like this clod? What does she see in this guy?" The only way I can do it is to pretend and to go back to what I saw in my wife. That's the only way I can get through it. Maybe it means I dunno ... I'm not gay [laughs] , other wise it would be a little odd if I were fixated on Tim.

It's probably what makes me something of a social cripple but yet ... [laughs] I'm sorry, I'm not even coming vaguely close to answering your question.

You're probably thinking at this point "Sam Kieth's probably a very complex, multi-facetted individual, or he's a complete fucking lunatic. I can't figure out which. Hmmn, maybe he's both!"

ST: Okay, on Zero Girl — the way I kind of view your career is you did the Maxx and it stopped, Sam Kieth fell off the face of the earth for a couple of years, he does Legs (which, by the way, I really enjoyed — I thought it was a very charming story)

SK: Well, the problem it is, it's a kid. It's a boy.

ST: Yeah, but it's one of your few male characters.

SK: I know, I know, and I don't think it works as well.

I spent probably a couple of years trying to make that boy a girl. It got really weird. When it was a little girl, it turned into some strange psychological weird story where this girl had this magic engine and it had a womb. She kept crawling up into the womb and taking a ride. It was very strange and people kept saying, "Look, if you want to do a girl story where she crawls up into a womb, do that story. This story just really wants to be a story about a boy who really likes cars who rides on the back of an engine." I was trying to hammer it [a girl character] in when it didn't belong.

It was really a script before it was a comic and it probably could have used several issues to breathe. It was kind of cramped into this tiny little thing.

ST: Now, the thing that was kind of interesting is that between Legs and Zero Girl, your art underwent a pretty radical change. To me it reminds me of what happened with David Mack and Kabuki. The first couple issues of Kabuki are all black and white, it has an elegant use of line, then he goes to Image, he goes to color and ohmygod, he explodes all over the page. I opened up Zero Girl and it was just ohmygod — Sam's exploding all over the page!

SK: In a bad way?

ST: No! I thought it was amazing. Were you consciously changing your art style, or was this something that was very organic for you to one minute have something that was classic pencils and inks, and the next have something that looked like it was done with a crayon, and then have something look as if it was painted all in the space of a few pages.

SK: Oh, you mean, are you talking about Zero Girl looking more realistic?

ST: No, just the art in it was very different from art that you've done in the past. Your art's always been very expressive, but in Zero Girl, on some pages your art would be extremely realistic looking, but on other pages it would look like you'd drawn it with a crayon, and on some pages it looked painted. Now, I realize that you're not the colorist, but this didn't come out of a void. Were these shifts in style conscious choices that you were making, or was it something that you did organically as a response to the kind of story you were telling?

SK: Gosh, I wish I had a really great answer. That's a killer question.

I think it probably grew out of desperation.

I figured when I was doing it, my first thought was, "Okay, I'm coming back to comics and nobody's going to care." The whole focus on Zero Girl was to try and get all the issues done before the solicitations came in for the first copy — which I was convinced would be so low I would never work in comics again. [Laughs] Seriously. I was like, "Okay, I've got to just slide through these things. The industry's in the toilet, and I'm coming back, and what am I doing? I'm doing these stories about a teen aged girl. She should be running around with rocket jets on her feet and an outfit and giant DDD cup breasts, and instead she's this little twerp in the corner in big fur jacket, hiding as much as she can. She looks like she's locked in some '70s underground comic. This has 'huge sales' written all over it."

I kept telling Scott [Dunbier] the editor, "Man, you're going to lose your shirt on this." He kept saying, "No, it's going to be fine, it's going to be fine."

I think the story I've just started on, the story I've just started on today — if I feel like Zero Girl vacillates between cartoony '70s about 30% more than what I normally did, then I really want to try and test everyone's patience by vacillating 10 to 90% . That might make a story that's just really schizophrenic rather than pleasant to look at, but I wanted something that would look like maybe Chester Brown or Robert Crumb drew it and then, boom all of a sudden, and then back again. I wanted to do it mostly in black and white with a few colored pages and maybe someplace small, like at Top Shelf or somebody like that. And I knew it would take a total bath and not sell anything, but it would be not designed to sell anything, it would be just for the right reasons. A nice 120 page single story that people could pick up and read.

I don't think I would have been ready to try something like that [Zero Girl] had I not been ready, going from the little Olive Oyl legs she would have, these little ... straws ... I was working towards getting more realistic and discovering how bad I am trying to be realistic. I'm looking back at it now and I see faces and eyes floating off left and right and I'm thinking, "Heh, even with photos it's still really hard to draw realistic."

[Sigh] I don't know, it's like I'm a cartoonist, and when I try to be an illustrator, it just all goes downhill. I'm probably better off being cartoonist than an illustrator, because I just don't really have the skills.

Y'know, when you ask a creator about what they do, they have no idea. They're clueless, they're blind. Here's my feeling about what it's like to create something: you're like a blind man in a room, you're off and you're feeling around, and you feel an elephant. You know the old joke, you feel the trunk, you feel the ears, you feel the toes, and pretty soon they say, "What've you got?" "Oh, I've got an elephant!" "Hey, cool." And then you turn on the lights and there's this zebra in front of you. Everyone says, "What the hell is that?" "I don't know." And you wait for them to start throwing rocks, but then they start throwing flowers, and saying, "Wow! Terrific zebra!" And you start bowing and sweating like a pig, saying, "Oh yes, thank you, yes. Cool zebra, cool zebra." But inside you're saying, "What the fuck happened? That's my elephant." You tell somebody this and they say, "We don't care, that's a cool zebra." "Okay, thank you very much."

You have no idea when you create something if it's going to be funny, if it's going to work, if people are going to like it. You're blind. You find out, just like everybody else, at the screening of the movie, or when the book's printed, and then it's too late. You're screwed.

So, when people say afterwards, "Were you ...?" Well, shit, we're all hoping. The truth is I have no idea. You take these little things and you put them all together and half the time, you have a story. Which blows me away, because they don't make a story when you lay them out on the floor — not in the order I draw them in. They don't. It's like ... hmmh, I want to work on page two today ... nah, I want to work on page 18, and I find myself working on page nine, saying to myself, "It would be better if she had the pencil in her hand on page two that she still has on page nine. Okay, I guess I better go back and put it in. Hmmn, over here, she really doesn't need a shoe, I guess we can get away with that, because the dog ate it on page three, okay, that's fine." You do it enough, you make enough mistakes. The people who win in the end are not even the people who make the least mistakes, but the people with the audience that catches the least mistakes. [Laughs] As long as you just pretend that — I was just watching this documentary, Stanley Kubrick's wife was talking about one of the last things he said just before he died, talking about his last movie, "Well, I fooled 'em again." [Laughs] "I got away with it, I can't believe I got away with it!" I'm not putting myself in that league, but when you're making something ....

You know what? Don't you feel like when you're reading a comic, you're making it too?

ST: Yeah.

SK: There's something about the process of reading a comic, because there's a lot of people that when they read a comic, it doesn't all turn into a story for them.

My mother, bless her heart, sits down to start reading a comic and its as if she goes, "Okay, here's the first panel. Now, the words say "Jim, stop that!' Now let me look down to the picture, oh, so that's what happened ..." and it's like her brain has to negotiate back and forth between the picture and the words. As a result she loses the rhythm of what's happening. She's gotten better over the years, but it's not a natural rhythm for her, to jump into that medium. It takes a leap of imagination to do so. It's something you and I take for granted, but it's a definite skill. Don't you think?

ST: Totally. Learning to read comics is different than learning to read a book.

SK: The integration of materials, the symbols, the idea. Think of all the symbols that we just take for granted, this dragged panel that's just hanging in space that represents time passing, or a montage, or you see a panel with somebody off in the distance and here they are in extreme close-up and you know what's happened is they walked up, but here's 3 shots of it. Yes, most people can put that together, but there's a lot of people that don't, and they're puzzled by it, and they have to think and the minute that concentration is called for, they're pulled out of the story.

ST: I sometimes get asked by people I give comics to, "Which is more important, the words or the picture, or do I read them both?"

SK: Right

ST: Or the idea that in a comic story panel a thing can function both as the thing itself and at the same time be a symbol on another level.

SK: Right, right. Exactly, there's all the levels that McCloud outlined in his book. You're struck with how many levels are operating when a person is reading, especially when it's a complex comic. I just read Diana Schutz's issues of Grendel, and I was struck with how, not knowing a lot of Matt's universe, I can walk into this world and there's some pretty complex things happening in this comic that utilize almost every thing that Scott McCloud is talking about in Understanding Comics. I would hate to try and think of my grandma or grandpa trying to fathom the complexities of this. It seems like a quantum leap from the comics I was reading, where Spider-Man was on the roof and he beat some guys up and then he'd help a little Hispanic boy put pigeons back in a pen, "Thank you." "Sure, Enrique. Now I'm going to go out to fight another day." It's pretty standard storytelling by comparison.

The irony is that even with all the complex storytelling, you can still have a piece of crap story.

I think the biggest problem I have with telling stories is that I've got to get closer to the stuff that's really happened. Otherwise ... there's a limit to how many people are going to read stories about big slugs and magic objects in the room that eat people. It's just going to test everyone's patience. "Oh yeah, he's done that again..." You've got to do something that's closer to the heart, something that's actually happened.

If you were to start writing a comic, Katherine, you should write a comic about what it's like to get together with your husband. What is it like to live with him. How is it okay? How does it drive you nuts? That would be an interesting, compelling story to me.

ST: Well, I did a mini-comic about working in the library.

SK: Oh, that's what you do? Curious.

ST: Back tracking to something you brought up earlier, you talked about how much things have changed between the Maxx and Zero Girl. One of the things I wanted to talk about is that Zero Girl came out of Homage and not Image. Why Homage and not Image — was it a better deal in terms of creator's rights, or money up front, or do you have a good working relationship with some one at Homage?

SK: Hmmn ... that's a lot of it; the other side to it is at this point in my career, you pretty much have a choice of doing a book on your own, not really making a lot of money on it, but being able to have a large percentage of the profits which really doesn't matter a lot in this market. But if you do something on your own, you have the right to own it, and maybe resell it to some other medium.

If you do something work for hire, you don't have much in the way of rights.

But, if you do something like Zero Girl where you own the character, but then DC or some other company helps pay a page rate, then you're hedging your bet down the middle. You get some money but then you're also giving up a portion of the rights to them. You also can't participate in it; it's a half-dozen — six of the other thing. Do you want to own something completely, do you want to own something partially and get a page rate and have limited participation, or do you want to do something completely work for hire? I've done all three. Obviously, there's no way I own the Hulk or Wolverine, but I just grew up reading them and I had no problem with that. I think even in the middle of all the Maxx stuff, I never thought that I would never go back and draw a super hero every once in a while. Especially considering that when I was doing the Maxx, it was because I couldn't get a job drawing Wolverine because I had no leverage. And now, all the people I used to know are running Marvel [laughs]. They've all moved up, [laughs] they're now old farts like me.

ST: And how is your Wolverine - Hulk? [Editor's note, this interview was conducted in October of 2001.]

SK: Oh, who knows? I haven't even started it yet and it's already in trouble.

I just painted a picture and wrote an outline and the next thing I know, they're talking about it at San Diego. I guess I better come up with something, huh?

I basically — I stuck a little girl on there, a goth looking girl, and was like, "Oh, it's fine. There's a girl in there. I guess I can write." As long as there's some introverted young teen on the cusp of something ... my wife has this idea that I got developmentally stunted when we first got together, that's why my characters are always these pouting teens. I disagree. I think she's full of crap. But what do I know? I don't get a vote. As long as I do the comics it seems okay.

But, like that other story I was telling you about, I'm going to do that, I'm going to own that. I can turn it into a script, which will be a script that eventually never gets made, but at least there'll be a script that I own, and I can use it as leverage and say, "Look, if you won't let me direct, I'll have to hold on to it."

Or, there's other things, like the Zero Girl thing, where I think I wind up getting 60% of the option money, and so I'm going to option it because there are some people I know that want to try and do some pilots for TV shows. But the irony is, if I option it, I'm optioning it partly for myself, right? [Laughs] So I'll wind up getting 60% of my own money back. It gets kind of stupid when you're the vendor but you're also the creator.

It seems pretty random at some point whether you decide — I mean, after the whole Image thing happened, and after all those people were making way too much money, you kind of decide, "Well, what do you want to do? What do you want to spend your time doing?" I mean, I don't want to be a mogul like Todd McFarlane or Jim Lee. I don't have the personality or the skills to be one of those kind of guys. I just want to go off and tell stories I like and do a lot of different things for a lot of different people. I notice that Matt Wagner's still out there doing Mage, and doing it for Image as opposed to Comico — because there is no Comico anymore. I think I'm going to continue to do stuff for Image, but I'm also aware that if I did something for Top Shelf, I'll reach different people than for Image, and the same thing for DC or Homage. It's like, on the one hand, you get all those Image fans, but on the other hand, people are like, "Oh, I never thought to look for you in this place, doing this kind of thing." That's why I'm kind of tempted by a Top Shelf thing. But then, there are people who say, "You know what, the same kind of people are going to read you. You can just go stand under a different awning, but everybody can smell it's just the same old you. Just forget about thinking you can pull in different people There's only 12 people in comics who read you, and those 12 people are going to find you no matter what you do. And you ain't going to get 13. Forget it. You've got the same 12 people, so shut up, Monkey Boy." Heh, all this theorizing — I'll probably do the same crap wherever I go. I was surprised there was as many people at San Diego as there was. [Laughs] Part of it was, I was such a dope and kept doing sketches for people. There really weren't that many people in line. It was just a slooooww moving line. But, the people who came at least got some cool sketches.

ST: How did you know, because I know you went off and you made that movie.

SK: [Laughs] Don't make a movie, by the way.

ST: Well?

SK: [Laughs] Don't make one like I did.

ST: But, to get a little sidetracked, how did you get started? How did you get into movies?

SK: [Laughs] I wish you had been there when the whole thing got started [laughs].

[Pause] You know what, I'm really grateful I had the chance to do it. It was a very humbling process. Mostly I place all the blame on myself [laughs]. I did some shorts — when we were doing the Maxx stuff. I took about $10,000. I had a choice. I went down to the people at ILM, and I wanted to make a big rubber Maxx costume — so he could wave to people at cons — but then I said, "Look, this is insane. I'm spending about $10,000 on a friggin costume?! Of the Maxx?! What am I going to do after the Maxx ends? I'll have a giant Maxx costume sitting in my house, it will be like five, six feet tall. What a stupid use of money." The other thing I was thinking about doing was a short. I said, "Of the two things, I think I'd rather have a short, not a big rubber Maxx outfit." 'Cause, you know, there was only so many parties it was going to be funny at.

So, I did a short instead with a bunch of these people down at ILM, who were willing to come down over a couple of weekends and shoot it. And yeah, it sounds so exotic, "ILM, wow!" but the truth is — they were great people and all — it looked like a hundred other student films. It was just a chance to start shooting stuff, making bad movies — doing the same thing I did in comics — and that lead to working for Roger Corman.

When I disappeared from comics for a couple of years, I went over and did some animated openings for a TV series that eventually wound up on the Sci-Fi channel — luckily the animated opening wasn't used — and I just wound up doing a movie for him. I thought it would be a million dollar movie and I told the story at the [SDCC] panel. I thought it would be this horror movie, but eventually it wound up being ... he does these family pictures. Like After School Specials, those kind of things. I did one of those things up by Tahoe for about $200,000 in 11 Days. And, uh, well, it is what it is [laughs]. Boy, I mean, you can say, "But look at all the people who started with Roger Corman." There are also a lot of people that disappeared who worked for Roger Corman [laughs].

The thing that I am grateful about it, and to him and his daughter for working on it, was that it was a chance to learn, just like I did in comics. Like he said, "Once you've done this, you'll never have to work for me again." [Laughs] And I said, "Good." So, I'm kind of like, "Look, I did this Roger Corman movie, so if it's signed, I get to direct the Maxx movie." And they're like, "Wow, hey man, that's great." But, really, they're not going to trust a giant $60 million movie to somebody like me. I haven't done anything.

The question I keep asking myself about movies is, "Where do guys who direct movies come from?" They've either written a movie that's done well, or they come up through, they slug their way through the gutter of production. They come up through directing small bad shorts, directing second unit on things, and so I knew going through ... the Corman factory ... would help make some people at least think, take me seriously, in terms of knowing that I've at least done something.

Now, the problem is, [laughs] you've got to make something good. Hopefully ... I'm in the middle of that negotiation right now. I'm glad I have comics while I'm doing all this, 'cause, your ego certainly takes a bath doing something where you're still learning how to do it. Well, at least mine does, anyway.

[Editor's note. Sam is too modest. His movie, Take It to the Limit, won the Gold Medal at the American Wilderness Film Festival.]

ST: So, how did you know it was time to get back into comics?

SK: [Laughs] After the Roger Corman movie! No, that's a cheat. It's a cheap thing to say, so I'm not going to say it.

I missed the fact that when you do comics, I'd sit down, I'd do the whole thing, and even if the whole thing sucks, at least it's all my fault. Totally my fault. I mean, I'm writing it, I'm drawing it, I'm inking it, and, other than Alex's coloring on it — which is great — it's ... if you want to throw a tomato, it's me. It's just nice to have that tomato hit me. Seriously. Probably the biggest problem of all the people I see that have been around a little while is complacency. This, "Oh yeah, there's that guy ...." You feel like you've done a story and you've got a bunch before you, and you've got a bunch behind you, so what makes this one any different?

The biggest thing I wanted to do with Zero Girl is have people who thought they knew me, and thought they knew my art, kind of do a double take. I wanted to get people who pick it up who had given up on the Maxx "Huh, yeah, the Maxx is cool, but it doesn't make sense ... it kind of lost me for awhile there."

The biggest thing I want to do now is tell definite stories that are five and eight issue arcs, that have definite endings, because that's just the way the whole industry is going.

[Laughs] I'm not asking you enough questions, am I? I'm just talking. Tell you what, the next few times you ask a question, I'm going to ask you a question back, because otherwise, it sounds like I'm just droning on, right?

ST: Well, no, not really, not when it's all edited.

SK: Please edit it, and stick in some imaginary questions, because otherwise it sounds like I'm going on for many paragraphs. Anything you can add to make me sound wittier than I really am.

ST: [Laughs] Well, there are a couple other things that I wanted to touch on, going way back, actually. How did you meet Bill Loebs? How did Epicurius the Sage happen? I mean, really, a comic about philosophers?

SK: Yeah, pretty weird, isn't it? I was actually talking with him yesterday. We're talking about trying do it again someplace.

ST: Any chance that the first two will be brought back into print?

SK: No, I don't think so. Don't think DC will do that. But everyone seems to like it, so it seems dumb not to keep it in print. Actually, I'm kind of glad to finally sell through with it. [Manical laugh] "Yes! Finally, we're out of print! We're not going back to press with that sucker! We've had them in the back rooms for years!"

I met Bill because we were both trying to get into a Harvey Kurtzman ... something he was doing about teaching people how to draw. Bill tried to get in, I tried to get in, and neither one of us got in. And me and Bill, and some guy who will now go down in history as "the third guy" were all three walking back to the convention, bemoaning the fact that we didn't get in. And Bill had just written Journey, and said something like, "Wow! You're a real guy, that's gotten a lot of good reviews. I'm trying to get in." I think I had ... hmmn, what was I doing? I might have been inking Mage. I was just doing little five page stories, trying to sell them places. And this third guy, we all three agreed to get together at the con and show our work to each other. He never showed up and Bill and I did, so we kind of met by default. We met because of Harvey Kurtzmann. If we had gotten into that panel, we never would have met. [Laughs] And actually, the industry would have been just fine had we never met.

He took me a under his wing a little bit. He'd been in longer than me and was kind of like an older brother in terms of helping me get into comics and stuff. That whole Epicurius thing really was his thing, and I've gone out of my way to return the rights back to him because I really felt it was his project and I just happened to illustrate. In the same way, he helped me to do the Maxx. I think that he really has a lot to do with helping me learn to write.

Probably the two people that on a direct level had the most influence on me and what I was doing was inking Matt Wagner on Mage, because it was totally different than any other comic I had done in terms of the manga influence, in terms of the minimum amount of words used, in terms of being very cinematic , being very overtly simplified. Mage was very very precise in its story telling. I would get the comic, I would read it, and then I would ink it — but the first thing I would do is read it like a comic, just to read the story, because I was excited. I had never done that for, like, five years afterwards, every other book was just another book. It was like "Hmm, let me read this month's Mage comic, and then I'll ink it afterwards. It will be alive while I'm reading it." And there was also another tiny thrill when he colored it, so Matt Wagner was a big influence in terms of thinking. That was a bar I aspired to raise myself to for years — even though he was never aware of it. But in my mind, I knew it would be great to tell a story like this. Bill Loebs was a writing bar, in terms of what he did was very literate. He's a very witty writer — as Epicurius shows. He's somebody who can both write and draw, but has always excelled at writing, whereas I'm somebody that draws and kind of snuck my way in through the back door in writing. I'm not even an artist. I'm just a freaking cartoonist that snuck in the back door.

But, whatever. Now I'm here, and everybody's screwed. And then, in a couple of years, I'll be out of here. I can't wait to die. It will be so cool to die, Katherine, know why? I won't hear my own voice chattering in my head anymore. My own voice, that's like the voice of some stupid little bimbo, "Yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah blah ..." I won't have to hear that anymore. The minute I die, that's all over and there'll be blessed relief from my own internal dialog that I can't shut off. Oh, that's quite morbid, isn't it? But wouldn't it be nice, if you had an annoying little voice like me, that just went on and on, not to hear it any more? To finally have some blessed relief, some silence? That's the one thing I think will be really cool.

I'm sorry, I've weirded you out, haven't I?

ST: Not too bad, because I've got an equally weird question to ask you.

SK: Good.

ST: And it's a weird one, and will probably be the best one to close on.

SK: Okay.

ST: So, what's with all those big feet? Are you trying to tell people something?

SK: [Howls with laughter] No, I — I, my god that's funny. But [deep breath] I should be so lucky.

I don't know what the big deal is with big feet. Scott Dunbier was saying to me, "What's the deal with all these people running around in Four Women hitting each other with sticks? And what was it with Amy running around and then all these guys come out and start hitting her with sticks?" I said, "I don't know. To me the weirdest thing is that all my characters all have their climactic revelations in bathrooms." There's just something about a bathroom that makes it almost this spiritual place. You're alone with yourself, it's a private thing. Beyond all the poo-poo ca-ca jokes, there's just something about it that's very intimate and ... stupid. I think feet fall into the same category of things that are stupid.