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A Dog Named Indie – Gabby Schulz

Louie Falcetti writes;

Hello and welcome to what can be tentatively called a weekly (but confidently called a bi-weekly) (let's just say regular) indie comics spotlight column, where I'll be checking out books from the world of independent, small press and DIY comics and talking with their creators. I'm going to bring to you a world that I was totally unaware of until just the last year or so and I know that's not a rarity, to spend most of your grown up comic book reading life never seeing beyond the capes and the cowls. Not that I won't be talking about capes and cowls comics here, just the ones that probably won't get optioned by FOX anytime soon (though maybe Michael Bay might be interested in Pizza Boy…)

For my first column I chose Ignatz Award winning creator Gabby Schulz (also known as Ken Dahl). Monsters was the book that nabbed him the award and if you were writing an autobiographical comic about herpes you might use a different name too. If you've spent any of your time tumblin' you've probably read him and not even realized it if you've seen this in your internet travels. I myself had never heard of him until a week before this year's SPX a friend of mine lent me Monsters which kept me up real late with it's honest, inventive story and beautiful pencils.

Then at SPX I ran into Gabby, just as randomly as I had come across his work days earlier and I was able to pick up his latest, Weather, published by Secret Acres. Weather features a protagonist that those who have followed Gabby's webcomics will be familiar with, Gordon Smalls, who now finds himself on airplane from hell as the most basic of bodily function is not only thwarted but every possible attempt at release is as well. Like Gabby's other work Weather is not just what it looks or sounds like from a casual glance. It's not a Seinfeld routine about how difficult everything on the airplane is and what's the deal with that first class curtain? Schulz takes a familiar setting and a relatable scenario and uses them explore everything about the now (both his and ours) that's wrong, from the way we treat each other, to the way we treat ourselves. However it's not just a laundry list of complaints or a depressive ode to one's navel, it has genuine moments of comedy born out of hard truths and ugly people. It also has genuine moments of beauty thanks to Schulz bringing watercolors into his work, like Dylan going electric (but without the snotty catcalls of enraged folk loving fascists) something that was already good becomes really great.

In the world of Weather, like the world of Tom Goes To The Mayor, there are no beautiful people. Everyone is a gross collection of body parts and misunderstanding. Gordon isn't so bad on the outside, but what's inside him is. Literally. The art in the book shifts with the tone, so when it's the unforgiving mugs of his fellow passengers, the attention to detail renders characters that would be at home on the pages of Crumb, or when Gordon is desperately trying to flush his underwear the art shifts again but to resemble a more comic sense of style not unlike a Sunday Funnies page from hell.

Weather is a perfect example of why indie comics are so important and so worthy of our attention. When you leave the world of on-going titles and corporate trademarks you get to experience something that has become almost totally foreign in the work of the Big Two, honesty. And when a book is just a self contained piece of an artist, an expression that states its' case and leaves but lingers in your mind, the difference between the two worlds is impossible to miss. And impossible not to celebrate, which is why I'm here with you and Gabby Schulz.

First off, how are you enjoying Ohio versus New York?

Ohio has been a great change from Brooklyn, where living meant misery & poverty. I had a pretty good job & pretty cheap rent, but I just couldn't take the Bloomberg lifestyle. Everything wrong with America today (wealth gap, ecocide, head-up-ass self-absorption, spectacle-empty [over consumption] & rampant [over stimulation], race war, bald 1%er hedonism, naked catfood-eating poverty, the transformation of police into an extralegal paramilitary ultraviolent racist army for the rich, worship of glamor & youth & gadgets, vacuous gentrification, etc) is magnified tenfold by that city, so it was a hard place to be broke, old & introverted. I had my fun there for a bit & enjoyed my cake-delivery gig, but I just couldn't take the horror. All I really want out of life is cheap rent & cheap beer, & as long as I'm stuck in the continental US, Columbus is pretty decent. (Don't tell the Billyburg/Greenpoint kids though!)

Can starfish really turn your insides to jelly?

Ha not really. I guess the worst is the crown-of-thorns starfish & that's just nausea and tissue swelling.

I need to say that when I got back to my hotel room after the show and I saw the name "Gabby Schulz" on the cover my blood went cold. All I could think was that I had gotten confused and maybe you were just trying to be nice by not correcting me. I googled your name peering between my fingers I was afraid to look at the screen, thinking that I had totally made an ass out of myself. You go by two names (at least), and reading about your life, it sounds like you've always existed in between cultures/identities. In "Sick" the protagonist shuffles through costumes that always leave him tattered and torn. Has comic creating helped you come closer to figuring out your actual identity? Does the work exacerbate identity issues or help sift through the pieces?

I guess the fake name helped draw a semi-autobiographical book about herpes. It helps draw comics in general when they're detached from your real self, especially now with the internet and all. In fact even with the fake names, I'll still be amazed if I'm ever able to get a real job again. Also getting a little distance from people when I'm drawing comics is good because in person I'm a polite & accommodating milquetoast and a little anonymity helps slough that off. (Sorry for the confusion though)

Is "Gordon Smalls" a straight stand in for you or is he your essence turned up to 11?

He's what I'm terrified of becoming in about 12 years IF I had any mathematical ability whatsoever. He actually is based on a guy who used to come to Copwatch meetings when I lived in Arizona. There's dudes like that in every city though, and they're always riding a bike and usually had some sort of engineering-related career at some point. My heart goes out to them.

In "Gordon Smalls Endures The Wasteland", Gordon seems to be seeking peace, or at least a real alternative to the society that (rightfully) disgusts and irritates him so, (irritates seems to be almost too light of a word), but upon receiving a light hearted(ish) verbal jibe from the two men he meets in the woods, he immediately retreats. He's a man who can't get comfortable. Do you think that's from within or without? Is there anyplace that Gordon could feel ok in, or is it just something within him that prevents him from being ok in his surroundings?

Well, the without informs the within, so I'm sure it's both. That comic in particular is especially close to home for me, since I was born & raised in Hawai'i from non-Hawaiian parents and then left. I really think there is nowhere "Gordon" could feel ok in, but isn't that sort of the theme of America in general too? I think if you're at all conscious of the history of this genociding, slave-founded, global-warring country, by now if you're white & not at least a little uncomfortable you're either an idiot or a monster.

Speaking of being comfortable, the situation in"Weather", starts with Gordon seeking comfort (of sorts), at least release. Both in "Weather" and "Sick" the protagonists can only escape their body inflicted misery by dreams of suicide. Though in "Weather" it seems to be less of a dour, capitulation and more of an escape. Why do you keep coming back to these themes? Is there only two options when confronted with the horror of modern living, eternal escape or living in misery?

I think it's a really important question these days, especially for (white, male, straight, educated, American) people like me — where's the way forward? It's easy to talk about it in overtly political terms, but harder to work through on a personal level. When I was more involved in activism things were framed as being very clear-cut, and yet there weren't a lot of answers for the issues i have personally with identity & maleness & whiteness, mostly because most of the available answers amount to "your people suck." Which is, of course, true. But, as a person who sucks, raised on a steady diet of suck in a terminally & worsening culture of ever-expanding suck, how do you live with that? How does one inhabit the monstrous shape of privilege? You can work to dismantle privilege" all you want & still not have an answer for how to live with yourself, in this system you represent & are a part of. Do I even deserve to reconcile my people's legacy within myself? Do I even deserve to talk about that — another white guy, Loudly Expressing His Important Opinions? Or, while fighting to expose & dissolve things like patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia, [male] dominance, capitalism, technology, etc., do you reach a point (as someone like me) where you've entirely alienated yourself from yourself? And is that a good thing? Is that inevitable? What is left of myself, after all that privilege has been betrayed? It's not like I'm going to get adopted into a new community. I get the feeling that there's a lot of people like me dealing with these same problems. At least I hope they are. As I get older I feel more & more that, if we are going to effectively abandon the old, shitty culture, we will have to create a legitimate new one in order to still be human — because the culture of radical youth, which is the best attempt at that we've had so far, is becoming increasingly unavailable to me. And frankly the attempts that I've seen at making that "new world," from white progressives or back-to-the-landers or postmodern hedonists or gun-accumulating libertarians or even anarchists, haven't been very inspiring. But then, no one in the history of political thought or literature (sci-fi included) have been very good at tackling the "so what happens now" questions. Even Marx's ideas of the future were shit. So I guess these are problems I'm trying to work out for myself in my comics, as honestly as I can, using myself as the test subject.

"Sick", I have to say, is one of the scariest, most thought provoking, beautiful, honest comics I've ever read, on a computer or on paper, easily. The pacing of it especially, slow, deliberate, each scene with it's own beat and rhythm. How do you pace your stories? Do you listen to music while you're creating or is there just an internal meter that propels your works forward?

It's all internal, I guess. The way I drew "Sick" was different from how I usually draw. I didn't even know how long it was gonna be when I started, or whether anyone would even read it; I just had a website & threw some shit up there. I wasn't thinking in terms of a whole story with a beginning an an end — I just let it go where it wanted, in chunks. I thought that was the only way I could make it honest, because with subject matter as personal and sensitive as this, too much craft or narrative — too much literaryness or graphic-novelness or whatever — snuffs the life out of it. It's so honest & self-eviscerating I have to basically trick myself into drawing it. It's not always the best way to make comics (or live life) but I thought it was appropriate for the story (whatever that is).

Body horror seems to be a reoccurring theme in your work as well, the way you use it however, to sort of eviscerate yourself rather than in a Cronenberg way of dealing with broader human societal issues creates this dichotomy of horror and beauty, as in "Sick" when you're holding up the ball that contains all the angles of your life. To you, what's more horrifying the world within or the world without?

I think after drawing Monsters & really examining what it means to coexist with a parasitic virus, it became clear how presumptuous we've been in the "civilized" West to assume that we're totally in control of our own bodies and minds. It turns out humans are not the Best Animal but are just one link in a vast, snarled, stuck-together, wending, gooey chain of life on Earth. Recent discoveries in parasitology have been pretty fascinating, & imply that there are a LOT more parasites crawling around in our bodies, affecting our choices, creating desires & fears, than we realize now. (See Carl Zimmer's amazing Parasite Rex for an introduction to this stuff.) I'm horrified by all that, but also fascinated with the idea that we will — that we must — learn to accept these nebulous influences on our lives and identities, and adjust our perception of self to accommodate the thousands of little friends that have been working their influence on us since long before vertebrates were even a thing. Distinctions like "good" & "bad," or even "self" & "other," start to blur when you consider things like the fact that our mitochondria started out as sexually transmitted diseases:http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4960-parasitic-invasion-credited-with-evolution-of-sex.html

I love what you've been doing with water color, what made you start? The colors in "Weather", they create this pallid, dirty palette that totally makes sense when dealing with the world of the inside of an airplane, at the same time, the contrast with the red, found everywhere outside the reach of the plane's ugly, thick inhabitants, it's a striking new direction for your work (I think, I mean I honestly discovered you myself a week before SPX).

I think seeing the work of Eleanor Davis & a bunch of French authors like Brecht Evans & Johann Sfar really got me excited about watercolors, they made them look so fun — and i've always thought shading in photoshop looked awful, & crosshatching took forever, so I thought maybe watercolors were a way out of that. Also I finally got it in my head that I didn't have to use xerox machines to print my work because it's the 21st century, & I could use color whenever the hell I wanted. ("Weather" was my attempt to learn how to do it though, don't tell anyone.)

Secret Acres is putting out "Sick" in print next year, correct? Where can people find out more about that and other projects of yours?

Yeah, I think it might be debuting at next year's TCAF in Toronto in May. I guess the Secret Acres site or twitter might be the best way? Oh duh, also my own website, www.gabbysplayhouse.com, which is currently being weird but still sort of works!

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