Do Not Underestimate the Power of the Dark Side A Hard Won Interview with "Darth Groth" by Katherine Keller Just how do you introduce Gary Groth? A cute, witty blurb? A recap of the controversies he's embroiled himself in? A short dignified statement about his important contributions? A list of the enemies he's made? (You can always judge a person by the caliber of their enemies.) Okay, how about: People seldom have any middle ground in their opinion of Gary Groth. You either think he's an asshole or an asskicker. If you like him, you'll probably like this interview. If you hate him, you'll probably wish we'd used our disk space in another way. Sequential Tart: How old were you when you discovered comics? Gary Groth: The first comic I remember reading was Metal Men #5 (in my pediatrician's office); you check the date. Must've been around '62 or so. From that point on, I bought comics regularly  one might say religiously  at drugs stores and supermarkets. ST: What titles did you particularly enjoy? GG: I remember reading all the DC comics in the early '60s, then "expanding" my tastes to include Marvel starting around '65 or '66. I remember buying all the back issues of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, et al. from mail order dealers in the late '60s. Unearthing early issues of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man was practically orgasmic before I knew what orgasmic was. ST: Your favorite comic of all time is...? GG: I could no more tell you what my favorite comic is than I could tell you what my favorite movie or novel is. ST: Who is your favorite filmmaker? GG: There are too many films and too many filmmakers that I love for different reasons. ST: When you want to curl up with a good book, your preferred author is...? GG: Someone I haven't read. Recent novelists I've read with great profit are W.M. Spackman, Edward Dahlberg, and Robert Creeley (also a poet, of course), and Glenway Wescott. ST: In your youth did you dream of breaking into a big comics company as a writer and/or artist? GG: I can't remember. I was offered an assistant editorship by Roy Thomas in 1973, at Marvel which I considered, but went to work for Jim Steranko instead. If I had taken Roy's offer and was a good little employee, I might've become editor-in-chief of Marvel instead of Jim Shooter. I shudder to think. I only spent three months at Steranko's Supergaphics working on Mediascene (later Preview) as an art grunt. I think I always wanted to publish myself rather than to work for an existing company -- even before I knew what publishing actually entailed. ST: What got you into publishing? GG: I published a comics fanzine when I was 14 and by the time I was 17 and looking at colleges, I told my parents I wanted to learn to be a publisher. Neither of my parents went to college, so we were all out of our depth. I finally went to the Rochester Institute of Technology, one of the leading printing schools in the country, because printing was as close to publishing as we could find  which, as I learned the hard way, isn't very. But, I can't really explain my early interest in publishing except by reference to that elation and pride at holding something in your hands which you were partly responsible for bringing into existence. ST: What initial vision lead to the founding of Fantagraphics? GG: Penury and an inability to hold a job, mostly. That's complicated. We started publishing the Journal in 1976; 1973-1975 was a weird time for me. I was close to being drafted into Vietnam, but the war ended months before my number was about to be called. Then, I watched with curious fascination and, finally, a vampiric glee, at Nixon's downfall. (I lived in Washington, DC, and read the Washington Post every day during Watergate, which was like taking a euphoric drug on a daily basis.) By 1975, I was desultorily working toward a journalism degree at the University of Maryland and holding down jobs in my spare time to make ends meet and generally feeling adrift and uneasy about my future, or, for that matter, anyone's future in America. As a way of trying to take control of my life, I turned to publishing, which I knew something about, and combined that with comics, which I also knew something about. ST: How has this vision changed (if it has changed)? GG: It's become more refined but hasn't, fundamentally, changed. ST: What was the Nostalgia Journal? GG: My way into publishing was to channel my moral impulses, which at the time amounted to not much more than my considerable indignation and scorn, toward The Buyer's Guide, which was the monopoly adzine at the time, owned and operated with, in retrospect, an almost endearingly amateurish ruthlessness, by Alan Light. I had always hated bullies and I had grown to hate Light's bullying tactics used against his competitors. The Nostalgia Journal was The Buyer's Guide's competitor and was, by that time, barely alive. It was published by three fans from Texas  Larry Herndon, Joe Bob Stewart, and Gordon Bailey  and they were keeping it going by what looked like pure will and a dogged refusal to be run roughshod over by Light. I offered to continue publishing it and to breathe new life into it. They accepted and gladly handed it over to me and my then-partner, Mike Catron. The Nostalgia Journal catered to fans of nostalgia, including comics fans. We narrowed the focus to comics and beefed up the editorial content. ST: And why did it get morphed into The Comics Journal? GG: Comics was where our main interest lay; we had little to no interest in other aspects of the nostalgia collector's market that The Nostalgia Journal catered to (movie posters, memorabilia, and so forth.) Our interest was in serious journalism and criticism, so the change was inevitable and happened pretty fast. ST: TCJ used to cover a lot more mainstream stuff. Why the shift in content? GG: When we started publishing the Journal, undergrounds were in a slump, and alternatives didn't exist -- so there was very little but mainstream comics to cover! As soon as better and more interesting work emerged in the early '80s, we slowly started giving less coverage to mainstream work and more to alternative art comics. We also ran out of steam kicking hell out of mainstream comics companies' business tactics and their content. ST: Some people consider TCJ the best academic quality journal about comics. Do you think you have succeeded in creating a viable academic journal about comics? GG: I never wanted the magazine to be an academic journal. My intent was to follow in the tradition of public journalism and criticism and directly engage the most pressing issues facing the artform and the industry. And I think we have succeeded to the extent anyone could have succeeded. ST: And why the emphasis on writing as closely as possible to academic standards? GG: Critical standards, not academic standards; you don't see many footnotes in the Journal, do you? I wanted to publish popular criticism and journalism aimed at a more general readership  at a time when such writing was waning in the mainstream due to the decline of the educated, generalist reader and the increased massification of culture generally. Writing about popular culture has become so dichotomized  between academic writers writing for an increasingly rarified audience of fellow academics and the reactionary hipness of popular magazines like Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, or Details. But, in the past decade, we've seen critical discourse increasingly monopolized by academic theorists, which, however inevitable, disappoints me. ST: Do many universities carry TCJ? GG: Few. ST: What do you think is TCJ's most important function? GG: We carried on the rather truncated tradition of Inside Comics and Graphic Story Magazine, the only two magazines I can think of that predated the Journal and weren't your usual mush-minded forums for fanboy enthusiasms. Ultimately, I think we became more confrontational than Inside Comics and brought criticism to a higher level than GSM. Our most important "function" might reside in the fact that the Journal is an individual, radical, cranky, idiosyncratic voice in comics  in many ways my voice, but latitudinarian enough to allow many others that often contradict mine  that has never settled into a comfortable market niche. I wish there were others like it; Dan Rayburn's Imp comes closest. ST: One of the issues raised at the journalism in comics panel at SDCC touched on the duty of a journalist. What do you think the duty of a journalist is? GG: I always thought it was the journalist's obligation to tell the truth, address serious issues, confront intellectual and moral chicanery. ST: What is the difference between journalism and entertainment? Do the two ever meet? GG: I learned on the aforementioned panel that journalism and entertainment are the same. Imagine my surprise! That panel was characteristically depressing and I don't know if I hid my growing sense of oppression on it. I felt like I was the sole member of the opposing team trapped in a locker room after the big game  after my team lost. All the "journalists" on it seemed perfectly content to have become part of the public relations industry. You don't need another screed as to how journalism has been absorbed into the entertainment industry, but I'll tell you one thing, I've come to despise the term 'entertainment.' It's a trump card used to justify every form of idiocy and debasement our culture can regurgitate. It's its own justification, an end in itself, the ultimate, circular market rationalization that makes any discussion of aesthetic, moral, or cultural values moot. ST: Despite the current industry emphasis on self publishing, what are the advantages in coming to a company like Oni, Top Shelf, Fantagraphics, Slave Labor, Drawn and Quarterly etc? GG: I can't speak for all those publishers, but I think that generally we'll support a book that may lose money, which is of considerable value to an artist. There is strength in numbers and we have a little more clout with distributors than an unknown artist self-publishing for the first time and may be able to secure more promotion for his work. Retailers may be more inclined to try new books because of our track record. Our expertise in production values, design, and promotion can be of enormous help. Then there's the intangible but very real value of being published by someone who appreciates good work and who's created a context where such work is valued by an educated readership. ST: Eros comics. Why sex and not superheroes? GG: I like sex. I don't like super heroes. ST: Have any ideas ever been rejected by Eros? GG: Many submissions are routinely rejected, mostly because they don't meet the level of quality we want. Seriously. I don't remember if any strips have been rejected specifically on the basis of the ideas they promulgate. ST: Despite the fact that Eros publishes a lot of pure undiluted wanker crap, some well received, well written, dare-I-say-it, thought provoking titles have also come from this imprint: Diary of a Dominatrix, Saucy Little Tart, Ironwood, and I Want To Be Your Dog. Any comments on those titles? GG: Not specifically; I think they all had something to recommend them: wit, humor, playfulness, real content. ST: A surprisingly large number of women like Bondage Fairies, any plans to market other similar titles? GG: Are you kidding? ST: One of the most common attacks against you is the fact that you publish pornographic comics. Yet, you've always been quite open about this and your reasons for doing so. Any choice harsh words for your critics? GG: The criticism doesn't discomfort me in the least. The only criticism that bothers you is criticism that's on target. The porn we publish is invoked by perennial carpers as the last, sputtering criticism when they can't make anything else stick. Publishing porn to subsidize literary work is practically a tradition in lit publishing, so my impurity doesn't bother me much. ST: You're one of the most outspoken people in the comics industry. Any regrets? GG: I can't say I regret any of the positions I've advocated over the years. I regret errors of fact or journalistic lapses that crept into the magazine over the years, of course. Steve Bissette caught me on a factual error in one of my editorials when I referred to Kubrick's Clockwork Orange movie rating being downgraded from an X to an R as proof of social mores changing (in typical Bissette fashion, he complained about this three years after the editorial ran, so it didn't make much sense to run a correction). The movie was actually Midnight Cowboy. And I regret falling for the false Peter David letter, though the sentiments expressed in response to it accurately reflect how I feel about the real McCoy. ST: Speaking of being outspoken, just exactly how did the feud with Peter David start? GG: I don't remember. I think he'd taken some potshots at me or the Journal in his CBG column before I ever wrote about him, and then we printed that letter from "Peter David" he claims wasn't in fact his. My response, written under the assumption I was addressing David, was a heartfelt denunciation of that particularly annoying brand of pompous, middlebrow celebrity-fanboy philistinism he parades around in his CBG column. I don't think I've written anything about him since (though we sparred occasionally on the internet). ST: What's "wrong" with Republicans and Libertarians? GG: I'm no more in favor of corporate totalitarianism than I am governmental totalitarianism, if you even want to bother making the distinction any more. The mechanistic, bureaucratic, impersonal, profit-driven brave new world of Republicans and libertarians is as suffocating and conformist as any top-down orthodoxy, whether religious or governmental. The ruthless pragmatism and bottom-line thinking to which their agenda must adhere is dehumanizing. ST: The Christian Right, those who want to "save the children", and just about anybody who thinks that their personal tastes are more important than the First Amendment  rant at will. GG: Where to start and when  or whether  to end. There is, first, their hypocrisy: the right, by definition, believes in maximizing economic exploitation, so they create the very circumstances they then blame liberals for, the Christian right's anti-Hollywood campaign being the best example at hand. Hollywood is, if nothing else, totally market driven and almost entirely free of such considerations as art -- a perfect Republican construct, in short, yet the religious right maintains that the sex and violence Hollywood feeds the public is some sort of irrational left-wing conspiracy. They probably think Marx was a pervert. The religious right doesn't have a monopoly on usurping the 1st Amendment on behalf of their agenda, either: look at Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon, where the left and right meet. We should certainly be concerned about the abuse of the 1st Amendment and the relentlessly sleazy exploitation of children (the current Pokemon fad and my son's adoration of it drives me crazy) but the only acceptable opposition to this is a cosmopolitan education  which the right also rejects as immoral. ST: As part of the preamble to the Fantagraphics panel at SDCC you spoke of how in the 1980's a sense of hope and vitality permeated the industry. What do you think led to the demise of that hope? GG: In brief, I think Scott McCloud's Creator Bill of Rights was essentially commodified by and turned into a moral rallying cry on behalf of morons like [fill in your favorite Image artist] who saw it as a ticket to making more money and failed to understand the moral, aesthetic, and intellectual obligations that inhered in the idea. When it became obvious that creator's rights didn't mean shit, that it was just another slogan adopted by untalented greedheads, it lost its authority and the few men and women of good faith were predictably dispirited in consequence. You can't universalize integrity, and creator rights sans integrity is just another commodity to market. It served as proof, to me anyway, that in a society as commercial as ours, there will always only be a handful of people who comprehend their obligations as artists and human beings and that the herd will make even the best ideas subservient to their own parochial and usually strictly materialistic interests. ST: You do little to disguise your intense dislike of the superhero genre. Do you think this distaste comes from the current oversaturation of these titles in the market? Or, to put it another way, if all genres had more equal representation in terms of market share, do you think you would like superhero titles more? GG: I think I'd dislike them less. As you know, I grew up reading super hero comics and I can still, with some fondness, re-read many of the comics I grew up reading and, in, come to think of it, many from the '50s I never read when they came out. My aversion to super hero comics comes from the fact that I'm 45 years old, that super heroes are, in my view, an intrinsically adolescent genre  perfectly OK if you're an adolescent  and that I've personally outgrown them; that I don't think you have artists the caliber of Ditko, Kirby, et al. doing super-heroes now and that, the landscape having changed so dramatically between 1965 and now, you aren't likely to have that combination of naivete, imagination, and craft applied to the genre. My personal theory is that the best super-heroes were high wire balancing acts that required a felicitous combination of wit, charm, seriousness, silliness, humor, guile, and ingenuity  CC Beck and Otto Binder's Captain Marvel being maybe the prime exemplar in this regard  and that the idiom  and maybe the times  has been too corrupted to ride that razor's edge any more. I'd love to see it because I'd love my kid to be able to read well-crafted super hero stories now instead of the drek I anticipate he'll read. ST: After meeting you in person at SDCC and finding you funny and charming, I half-jokingly remarked that you must be the sort of person who can only write when good and mad. How true is that? GG: Yes, it is true. For good or ill, I think I'm most valuable when I'm addressing usually what I consider a moral or intellectual affront. I assume that has to do partly with my convictions and partly with my personality. If I write something it's got to be with passion, and I find that that's what I'm most passionate about. Frankly, I find writing that lacks that sense of urgency pointless and a waste of time. ST: While we chatted at SDCC you described yourself as a romantic. Are you sure you didn't mean cynic? GG: I'm a romantic and a cynic and, in fact, I don't think you can be one without being the other: a romantic because you want the world to change for the better and a cynic because you know it won't. ST: In the same half-joking manner, I told you my personal nickname for Fantagraphics/TCJ was "The House of Bile." Indeed, some common complaints about TCJ are that it's a function of your ego, the sky is always falling as far as you're [TCJ] concerned, and that endless venting of spleen has worn thin. Any comments? GG: As I've grown older, I've learned that it's healthy to ignore such ignorant prating. I write out of conviction, like most decent writers, and I don't follow the fashionable tenet of not making waves. We may be perceived as the House of Bile because we're more honest and forthright in expressing our unorthodox opinions and that such opinions fly in the face of the public relations happy face that American culture embraces, the better to sell you a bill of goods by lulling you into a state of complacency. ST: You wake up one morning and discover you're not the head of a small but highly respected company  you're the president of Marvel Comics. What do you do? GG: Commit suicide? That's a funny question, but the interesting reductio absurdem, I think, is that neither I nor anyone else, irrespective of our good intentions, could do anything salutary in that position. You can't turn the clock back; you have stockholders whose profits must be your highest priority; you have a dwindling, middle-aged fanboy customer base; you have a megalomaniacal celebrity professional base who must be continually pampered, which is increasingly hard to do in a penny ante business And so on. It's hopeless, really. Anyone who thinks he can subvert this corporate behemoth from the inside and turn out good kids' comics is deluding himself. All we can do is watch it sink.



Fantagraphics Website

The Comics Journal Online

