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Special Feature
Tell All, Make Up More Ames & Haspiel separate fact from truth
By Adam McGovern
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Head and Heart: Jonathan (left), Dean (center) and some guy I don’t think I know at Brooklyn’s King Con, November ’09.
Comics thrive on contrast, between elemental forces or dramatic personalities – both in the cast and in the credits. Author Jonathan Ames and artist Dean Haspiel confirmed themselves as one of comics’ definitive duos with a single, major work (The Alcoholic GN, Ames’ meta-memoir brought to life by Dean) and an enduring creative friendship (including Dino’s design-work and, in one case, character-inspiration for Jonathan’s HBO series Bored to Death, and his illustrations for Ames’ newest essay and story collection The Double Life Is Twice as Good). With Haspiel a visionary automatic writer on his own and Ames an acute visual thinker equally assured in prose or screenwriting, the kindling for team-up combustion was there from the start, as were the magnetic opposites and essential kinship – in their solo work, the confessional Ames is a poet of self-consciousness and the larger-than-life Haspiel an icon of impulse, but together and apart, their flawed, fearless characters make them patron saints of being yourself and accepting each other. Under the interview interrogation lamp, they’re often most eloquent when describing what the other guy does. This was a partnership meant to be, and when I hounded them at various recent New York fringe-culture events they had their story straight each time.
AM: Jonathan, your short comic story with Nick Bertozzi in The Double Life had twists and gags that work much better shown as quick comic-panels than described as runs of text. For The Alcoholic was there a prose novel in your head that you were converting to a comic, or did you conceive it directly with visuals in mind?
JA: Actually, my story with Nick, “Next-Door Neighborless,” was based on an essay of mine, which I can't find in my books, but exists somewhere and I threw on a fictional ending for the comic, which, to be exact, was a re-creation of a passage in the essay. So that came from a piece of prose, whereas The Alcoholic was conceived of as a visual book from the start, since I came up with it as a means to collaborate with Dean Haspiel.
AM: A screenwriter knows what will be conveyed by setting and atmosphere and people’s expressions and the pace of movement. Were there spaces where you knew Dean could just carry things along so you went light on the writing, or did you just block it out like a novel knowing he could fruitfully mess with it?
JA: I wrote the script with a fair amount of detail – down to the characters' expressions and so forth. Dean was like the cinematographer; he took my script and ran it through the prism of his beautiful talent. Literally and metaphorically, we were on the same page 95% of the time as to his interpretations of my words. Very rarely did he interpret things in a way that I didn't think matched my intention, and then on some occasions he would take my words in directions I didn't expect and the result was almost always something I liked and admired.
AM: Who came up with ideas like putting some captions after the action, as if to signify thoughts that come too late to have an effect, and devices like the distorted face refracted in the empty beer glass, like the black-out of reason producing monsters – and I guess as a secondary question, depending on who suggested what, did Jonathan bring his screenwriter’s sense to bear on some of these visuals or did Dean’s interpretation inform the mind’s-eye of the screenwriting Jonathan’s done since?
JA: It was a mix. I would suggest certain visuals – like “Jonathan” being on the ceiling at Veselka, when he astrally projects himself during the dinner with Monica Lewinsky, and then Dean came up with many fascinating flourishes. It was a real simpatico collaboration.
Unbearable lightness: A pre-inked Dino panel from The Alcoholic.
DH: When I first read the script for The Alcoholic, I remember thinking that Jonathan Ames was a quick learner and he wrote a very intuitive script for me to draw, not unlike a screenplay for comics. There were page and panel breakdowns and, when scenes got a bit talkative, Jonathan made sure to write action so that the story wasn’t a futile exercise in drawing talking heads, as a lot of semi-autobio comix tend to be. Luckily, Jonathan is a kind and generous collaborator so he would yield to my comix expertise and almost always agreed with my visual interpretations of his intentions, including my arrangement of where the text should sit on the page. There were a few instances that Jonathan was haunted by the accuracy of my solutions and that synergy confirmed we were meant to make stories together.
AM: Dean, when you write prose it tends to trigger a comic in my head, and like Jack Kirby, whose writing gets pilloried a lot, the text part of your comics is almost like a remix of what we’re seeing, kind of amplifying and commenting on the art instead of just describing what we can see anyway. Do you write out a script for yourself to follow, fill in text where it’s needed after intuitively drawing it out, or some spontaneous mix as you go along?
DH: I usually write a full script to draw from but when I revamped Billy Dogma [Haspiel’s saga of a man-child/god-doofus] in “Immortal” for the launch of [the webcomics collective] ACT-I-VATE in early 2006, I had no idea what I was going to write and draw. I had gut feelings for what I wanted to express but there was no predetermined story arc and I didn’t know the beginning, much less the ending. I had no safety net. If I could finesse mini-cliffhangers between episodes and keep myself interested in what was going to happen next, I hoped that would create the same suspense for readers. I knew I was going to wing it and that’s what made Billy Dogma exciting.
Most of my hyper-pulpy dialogue was written in knee-jerk response to my art and it wasn’t until I was halfway through drawing “Fear, My Dear,” the sequel to “Immortal,” that I realized I needed to nail down an actual plot or suffer the consequences of narrative derailment. I devised self-imposed character and narrative rules to lean on in case I got lost and that helped me a great deal. I just completed the plot of my next Billy Dogma story, “As Big As Earth,” something I hardly did before but felt it necessary as this arc comments on the first two stories and Billy Dogma gets galactic, which is something I’ve wanted to do and couldn’t figure out how to until now. And, now that I’ve rooted the story, I can abandon it or expand on it for experimental purposes knowing that, in case things go awry, I can revert to the genesis of my concept.
Gut reaction: A splash page from Haspiel’s stand-alone epic.
AM: I do think your writing is very visual – chunks of idea that are chiseled very close and serve as, like, schematics for these totemic, visceral concepts. And Jonathan’s prose writing for me is like the libretto for Edward Hopper’s collected paintings – the city as theater of solitude. Is the dividing line between word and image so strong to begin with?
JA: Are you referring to my prose in The Alcoholic or in my novels? The prose in The Alcoholic is not meant to be visual – it's just voiceover/commentary/the-character's-storytelling-monologue for the reader. In my novels and essays, where I don't have an artist like Dean accompanying me, I use my prose to create visuals in the reader's mind. Anyway, I'm not sure I understand your question, but it sounds good – you seem to be praising Dean, which is nice, and I like the paintings of Edward Hopper. I would say that my work is probably more comedic than Hopper, but I'd be happy to write anything that went with his paintings.
DH: Writing comix is a very difficult format to master because it involves a subtle dance between words and pictures that, in the very best of circumstances, yield to each other's virtues while acting seamless in unison. With that in mind, I try to compliment the script with my omniscient pictures while serving the story. Text confirms what you think you’re seeing while adding internal intelligence and/or feeling.
AM: As collaborative comics go, the artist’s contribution is especially clear in a book like The Alcoholic or Pekar’s The Quitter [also illustrated by Dean], but the presence of the writer’s voice is uncommonly felt as well; it seems like the visual version of “as told to” rather than the kind of thing Dean would’ve come up with on his own. How much did you go for a blend and how much did you want some tension too?
JA: Dean in his auto-bio stuff will take the “as told to” approach and then in his other work it's more third-person. Regardless, Dean was a great collaborator – he served my voice and vision in this project. Like a great cinematographer, he brought my words to life. It was like we were playing music together. He took my lead and then improved on my lead.
DH: As the artist, it’s my job to create visual solutions so as to give the writer the option to edit, expand, and/or delete text where necessary. Comix collaborations always involve two authors (the writer and the artist) who bandy the narrative baton until fruition. Curiously, with semi-autobiographical fare, the writer’s “voice” is often scrutinized and made more accountable than the art.
AM: Indie comics can be infamous for being religiously verité in their scribbled anti-style and raw feed of daily diary. But Dean energizes the everyday in a way that makes it interesting to many more people than just the artist and maybe his friends, and Jonathan shapes and dramatizes experience in a way that makes me feel I know more about the main character in The Alcoholic than I do about the subjects of ostensibly more direct autobiography comics. Did you guys feel that there’s better ways to shine a light on reality and get at the truth than just what we normally can see and the facts we’d typically tell?
JA: When I write I have one main goal: do not bore the reader. Now whether I achieve that through humor, honesty, or compelling story (or all three), that's my goal. Now, of course, I may not always achieve this and for many readers I don't, but my primary concern is to entertain and keep people amused and interested. I believe that Dean brings that same philosophy to every panel, which is why he tries to make the more mundane moments, like a character on the telephone, somehow visually interesting. He also does this for selfish reasons – to keep himself interested while he draws.
DH: I believe the extent of Jonathan Ames’ comix culture were early Marvel Comics of the 1970s/’80s (when he read The Avengers as a kid), Alison Bechdel’s recent Fun Home, Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man, and, of course, some of my comix, including my collaborations with Harvey Pekar. So, I doubt Jonathan responded [to] much in the way of indie-comics to write his unique spin of verité in comix form.
What originally drew me to Jonathan’s writing was his morbidly candid yet sweet honesty and the way he took care of his characters to, sometimes, the detriment of his own persona. There is a vulnerability in Jonathan’s stories that allows access for readers to indulge themselves yet engenders a universal appeal. Like Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, and other authors who share too much information in a highly personal yet poetic way, Jonathan Ames’ stories open doors for discussion. Ames is a renaissance man, a sad jester, who, no matter the challenges of the medium, delivers emotional truths.
Don’t analyze it too much: Jonathan and Dino as Jason Schwartzman and Zach Galifianakis as a shrink and a superhero in one of Dino’s Bored to Death sketches.
AM: On that same plane, Jonathan, the dialogue and behavior on Bored to Death are just like everyone’s common thoughts and impulses turned inside-out. Is fantasy the truer way to get at what you were really thinking about an event or a person – in a way you may not even have figured out before it got reprocessed as this kind of recorded dream?
JA: I don't think I put that much intellectual thought into something before I do it; it's all a primordial sea in my mind and then I try to carve something nutty and vulnerable and lively out of the sea and present it to others. Now, you train for this by reading a lot of stuff or watching a lot of stuff and then writing a lot of stuff, but there's just not that much intellectual explanation/preparation before you actually do it. I don't mean to sound pretentious. It's like taking a flute and blowing a sound. You don't really think about blowing the air. You just blow it. Now if you're an expert at the flute, you control your air and all that, but that's through practice and study… but, still, most of it is instinctual, like doing something in athletics – you come up with stuff in the heat of the moment without much forethought. But I guess you have to put in a lot of work – reading and writing, practicing the flute, practicing sports – before it can become instinctual. So my longwinded answer is this – the TV show is a funhouse mirror on life. All of my work is a distortion of real life. It's all a weird puppet game. It's not a documentary. It's not realism. It's a play.
AM: The show focuses on the absurdity of guys kidding themselves though the original prose story it’s based on reads like a rebuke to the idea of heroism, showing exactly the kinds of things that would really happen if someone tried to be the kind of character they read about. How much fantasy is too much?
JA: I didn't see the story as a rebuke. The guy did get in over his head, though, which for me is the nature of stories – the moments where we are overwhelmed and tested. It can be everyday life that tests us or great big grand crazy things, like in thrillers. Either way, people (the reader, the audience) identify with struggle and trying to survive. Stories (comics, TV shows, plays, novels, movies, etc.) are big metaphorically staged representations of our everyday struggle to figure stuff out and not be overwhelmed with despair.
AM: I guess more than one source makes up our picture of a person – how they seem to us face-to-face, plus what other people think of them, and stories that you’ve heard – and there’s more than one narrative running in our head and into our eyes about even our own life. So Bored to Death is self-referential but not in a straight line; “Jonathan Ames” has become a character – several characters – in your fiction, and the guy who’s based on Dean both looks and acts as much like Dean’s creation Billy Dogma. This show may be revealing, but do you make sure it’s put off-register from reality to begin with?
JA: Here's what I think might be an answer: the show, and all my work, is a soup. I throw in real stuff and fake stuff and then some more fake stuff and then I stir it up. What comes out is definitely a fiction, since most of it is made up, but there are a few traces of real facts – for example, I had to wear a corset when I was in the third grade and so “Jonathan” in the show talks about having to wear a corset – that stick out, kind of like little pieces of a floating carrot in the soup.
The Picture of Jonathan Ames, from Dino’s limited-edition print.
DH: Albeit loosely based on me, the “Ray Hueston” character in Bored to Death hardly represents my persona. “Ray” may share some similar storylines I’ve endured but his outlook and response to life is very different from mine. Let’s not ignore the fact that actors bring a lot to the table, too. Besides, I believe the three major characters that make up the codependent ensemble in Bored to Death represent three sides of Ames, as it should [be], since he is the creator and driving force behind their desires, fears, and achievements.
I think it was Bob Fingerman who coined the term “speculative memoir” when he wrote and drew his latest series, From the Ashes, about a near-future apocalypse starring him and his wife. Bob’s characterizations were based on historical and behavioral trends but contrasted against what might could be if put into a proposed situation. I believe that’s what most authors are doing when they write good fiction. They’re putting a version or versions of themselves into a situation, a time machine of sorts, and reacting innately to stuff in hopes of excavating knowledge of tomorrow.
[www.jonathanames.com]
[www.DeanHaspiel.com]
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