It was at a discount bookstore in Ohio on the day after Christmas when I discovered the work of Paul Hornschemeier. I’ve been depressed ever since.
As someone who’s wanted to be an illustrator since childhood, I’ve taken a fair share of drawing classes. And for those who don’t know, one of the first things that they’ll try and teach you in and drawing class is that you have to discover and develop your own style. Apparently that’s complete crap.
Paul Hornschemeier, writer and illustrator for books such as Life with Mr. Dangerous and All and Sundry, has become quite successful at doing everything he can to avoid being identified with one specific style of drawing. If you didn’t know better, you might pick up one of Paul’s books and think it was an anthology collection from dozens of different artists.
It’s hard to say whether it’s that Paul doesn’t have a style or that he’s able to harness multiple styles — but whatever it is, it’s not just limited to his illustrations. His storytelling also alludes definition. With each story so drastically different from next, one might imagine the author to suffer from some kind of multiple-personality disorder.
So why the depression? Because it almost seems unfair. So many artists and writers out there desperately trying to cultivate their own unique voice and style — and here’s Paul Hornschemeier with both coming out his ears. Too bad they can’t tax talent.
After finding that copy of Let Us Be Perfectly Clear on that snowy day in Ohio I was obsessed with learning more about its creator. Thanks to the internet finding him wasn’t too hard, and luckily he was kind enough to indulge my curiosity.
What was it like growing up in Ohio? I mean, did growing up in Harvey Pekar’s neck of the woods have any influence on you as a comic book creator.
Rural Ohio, where I grew up, is a like a good cartoon: there’s a lack of detail that lets you fill things in as you see fit. There’s certainly a midwestern character to it, but I don’t think it has the hard-edged definition that you experience in a major city. I think that openness (and at times bleakness) informed my comics far more than anything else… or I should say it concretely informed who I was, and that in turn informed my comics.
Unless it was sold at a flea market or a bargain bin at the county fair, I was woefully unaware of cartoons growing up. I knew what was in The New Yorker, some Edward Gorey, Gahan Wilson, Charles Addams, and the cartoons in the newspaper, but things like Crumb or Pekar were beyond my limited, pre-internet horizon. Harvey could have been in Paris for all I was aware of him growing up. Though it was funny, speaking with him years later, how much he knew about the region where I grew up and that he’d even heard of a relative of mine.
What really got you into comic books — particularly the “indie” comics? Did you initially set out to do those types of comics or was there a brief period where you entertained the idea of illustrating something different?
I started reading comics around age 4 or 5, something like that, but really wasn’t introduced to independent comics until my Sophomore year of college. Actually, that’s not true… I first found a self-published superhero comic in a comic book shop in Cincinnati, probably my senior year of high school. And THAT was my first exposure to the idea that someone could just do something on their own (which I think is the true spirit of independent publishing, though it’s often conjoined with a notable absence of superheroes). It was really mind-blowing at the time.
I was definitely into doing superhero comics when I was 13, 14. By the time I was 16 I was a very practiced rip-off of Jim Lee and that whole Image aesthetic… but around that time I was putting more thought into my stories and I started thinking, “Wait, why does he have on all this crap? Why would he have all this spandex and ponytails and huge shoulder pads (the Liefeld school of costume design)?” And then I couldn’t justify their powers scientifically, or the plots from a literary standpoint… and slowly my superhero stories started to change into science fiction, and then just more psychologically-driven fiction.
Continued belowBy the time I was about to graduate high school, I just didn’t see where those kind of comics would really fit into the world. So I quit… and it wasn’t until I found independent cartoonists like Dan Clowes and Charles Burns that I realized there were people actually out there creating and publishing this sort of thing.
I’m a big fan of “Let Us Be Perfectly Clear”. Tell me about the process you went through in creating that collection. How do you stay organized when shifting between so many styles of drawing and storytelling? What was the intended purpose of the book?
Well, that book wasn’t created all in one shot. It’s really three books: Forlorn Funnies no. 1, no.5, and Return of The Elephant. But Forlorn Funnies no.1 (“The Men and Women of The Television”) is a lot of different styles all flowing in and out of one another… that was sort of the idea for that whole book. And I guess that carried over to a degree in how I designed the whole collection, trying to make it work as one unit. How I keep them organized? Good question. If I figure that out I’ll let you know.
In all seriousness, I keep pretty good records of everything here and have several flat files dedicated to each ongoing project. I’ve had to get more and more organized as I’ve gone along, otherwise I’d lose my mind. At any given point I’m working on five to ten things in various stages, so I guess the switching back and forth between styles and stories is just something that’s second nature to me now. I’d get bored if I didn’t do it.
I think the main thing that’s useful for me in drawing in different styles is to not switch in the middle of a longer piece. So I’ll do several days or weeks just drawing one story, then I might put that away and shift to another. But I don’t work on, say, five different ones in one day. You’d spend too much of your time switching your brain over to thinking in another style. And really do have to try to think in the style, not just draw in it. That’s one of the hardest parts, and it’s something I always struggle with. It’s like a weird version of method acting.
How long does it take you to complete a story, from conception to printing?
That’s a tough one. From the initial germ of an idea to a printed book? It could be anything like six years to ten years. But by that I mean just initially jotting something down on a piece of paper or somewhere in a sketchbook. You never know what’s going to congeal together and start to have more gravity and begin to pull you into it. That’s the best way I can think to describe it: I’m just amassing all these disparate elements and then they slowly begin to tell you what part of what story they are. Or they fizzle out and disappear. Over the years, I’ve gotten better at knowing more quickly which ones are which, but it’s still a long process.
As far as actually writing a script, doing the layouts, and drawings the pages, that’s probably more like a year and half to two years.
What are you currently reading? What do you look to for inspiration?
Right now I’m reading “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the art of editing film.” I’ve been working on various TV and animation projects, so I’ve been sort of putting myself through a makeshift films school over the past year, trying to learn as much of the (endlessly complicated) world of film production as I can. As for inspiration: anything really. I’m always finding great illustrators, cartoonists, painters, cinematographers, etc. on tumblr. Lately I’ve really been looking through Roger Deakins’ cinematography and looking at Wayne White’s early puppets and Jim Nutt’s early paintings. You just want to mash them all together and see what comes out… What if a Jim Nutt painted figure and a Wayne White puppet were walking through a Deakins’ minimalist landscape? Just thinking about it I really want to see that happen…
Continued belowWhere do you see yourself going? What do you hope to see in the future for comic books like your’s, or in general?
I’m still working on comics and am excited to get back to doing a series (Forlorn Funnies), but I’m also moving things more to the web. I think that’s where you’re going to see most serialization, if anywhere: web comics and iPad editions of things. But I’ll keep putting out physical book collections of things too. I don’t see that going away, I just think it’s going to be a bit more specialized, not unlike vinyl sales in the music world.
But I’m also branching out a lot from comics, just because there are a lot of other things I want to explore. I think that’s one of the best things about living in this time is that technology and the internet makes it so much easier to explore other media and other means of telling your story, and then loop it all back into comics however you want. The borders are blurrier between worlds, and that’s a really amazing evolution to experience.
Paul Hornschemeier has two books scheduled for publication from Fantagraphics in 2013: Forlorn Funnies Vol. 1 and Artists Authors Thinkers Directors.
