IN THE MAGAZINE

THE BIGGEST COMIC BOOK EVER - PART 2

Kramers Ergot Isn't Just "Isn't Just for Kids Anymore" Anymore

BY NICHOLAS GAZIN


JOHNNY RYAN
Johnny is that guy who’s in Vice all the time and does the funny business. Come on, you know this fucker already. He’s extremely humorous, but he also is pushing and expanding traditional comics stuff way more than a casual reading by a stupid person like you might reveal.

Vice: Your page in the new Kramers is a parody of a comic that David Heatley, who’s also in the new Kramers, had in the last issue of Kramers. Well played. Have you caught any heat from him over it?

Johnny Ryan: I don’t know what he thinks. I just thought it would be funny to parody a Kramers Ergot comic in Kramers Ergot for some reason. My page also includes a penis-measuring device, though, making it the only truly useful page in the entire book.

Johnny Ryan

Oh yeah, it’s based on a scale of comic characters from Witchy Poo to Marmaduke. What do you rate on the Kramers Peter Meter? I rated “Sluggo.”

Dagwood.

How’s married life?

Are you hitting on me?

No. Are you hitting on me?

Gross!

Does Howard Stern acknowledge those ever-increasing posters you make featuring all the people on his show?

Not Howard Stern personally, but I’ve heard from people on the show like Ass Napkin Ed.

Is your goal to get out of comics and end up as a toy mogul or screenwriter or video-game-concept artist? It seems like that’s what people who become successful in comics do. They get into comics so they can get out.

I dunno. I don’t feel like I’m actively looking for a way out. All my ideas right now are comics-centered. I’m not pitching any TV shows or writing any movie scripts at the moment. If somebody asked me to pitch a show, I’d probably do it pretty half-assed—I’m bad at that shit. But who knows? If a good opportunity presents itself, like Rock of Love Bus or Bromance or something awesome like that, I might do it.

What are you reading these days?

I’ve been reading lots of manga like Berserk, Dragonball, Slam Dunk, Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby, and Tokyo Zombie. Also some superhero stuff, too, like Walt Simonson’s Thor. And Ganges by Kevin Huizenga, Herbie reprints, Boy’s Club by Matt Furie, and Powr Masters by CF.

Really? What do you like about Dragonball and Slam Dunk? I always thought that kind of manga was pretty boring.

Manga is just like American comics in that there’s lots of bad shit, but there’s still some really great stuff if you’re willing to look for it. Slam Dunk is not a good example of really great manga. It’s just fun teenager comics. They don’t really make comics about high school basketball or romance over here. And Dragonball is terrific. It’s probably meant for 12-year-olds or something, but it’s still wild, funny, and imaginative enough to keep my attention. Also, check out The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu or Ultra Gash Inferno by Suehiro Maruo. But I don’t know, if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. What the fuck you want from me?

Can you tell me what Dragonball is about?

There’s a bunch of these magic balls and if you collect them all you get one wish, so all these crazy characters go on a mad hunt for the balls, like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World but with fighting and monsters. Even though it’s meant for kids, there’s lots of juvenile-type sex jokes in it. I guess kids in Japan are allowed to read that kind of stuff.

Are you ever going to do a series of manga parodies like Funny Pages or Klassic Komix Klub?

Who wants to see that?

Matt Furie

MATT FURIE
Matt is a stunning new talent who does comics about anthropomorphic animals. His subject matter ranges roughly from stoner humor to acid humor. Pretty much everybody is watching this guy right now.

Vice: Do you get upset when people say you’re just a Ben Jones rip-off?

No, because the rumors are true—I am a Ben Jones rip-off. He is my favorite artist and I copy everything he does. I would stalk him if I could, but I live out in San Francisco with all the gays.

So you have no harsh words for your accusers then. You’re owning it.

Ben Jones is like the Rolling Stones in the 60s, and I’m like the Black Crowes or early-90s Aerosmith. I actually first found out about Paperrad years ago through an article in Vice. After that I hunted down some Ben Jones comics and they totally blew my mind. He had jokes like “What’s crappening?” with a drawing of a dude shitting his pants and other stuff like a guy teaching a dolphin what a food “wrap” was. They were done in a complex yet simple style and I fell in love with them. When I set out to start doing comics, he’s what inspired me to make the characters simple line drawings rather than these detailed crosshatched masterpieces I’d been trying to make at the time. There are a lot of similarities between my Boy’s Club comic and Ben Jones’s stuff like Alfe, but at the same time there are also interesting spiritual elements mixed in with the humor in Ben Jones’s work. My stuff is pretty much limited to fart humor, catchphrases, and vomit gags.

What’s more important to you, your paintings or your comics? Is one of them “for real” and the other more like a hobby?

I actually don’t do paintings. Almost all of my color drawings are done with Prismacolor markers and Prismacolor pencils. I also use a bit of India ink and liquid acrylic and outline all of my drawings with Micron pens. But to actually answer the question—the Ben Jones rip-off comics are just as important as the colored-pencil drawings.

What comics were you into as a kid?

There was a comic-book shop down the street from our apartment in suburban Ohio and I would walk down there to buy mostly Image comics, but also some Valiant and Dark Horse. Stuff like Spawn, Savage Dragon, The Maxx, and Hard C.O.R.P.S. Even before I got interested in comics I was really into Garbage Pail Kids and these little square, Japanese, super-deformed stickers that I collected from peanut-butter-flavored cookie bars I bought at this Japanese grocery I could ride my bike to. I traded these awesome stickers to my friend Mason McClew for some shitty Marvel cards and I have regretted it ever since. I was actually on eBay this morning trying to hunt some down, but I forgot what they were called. If anyone out there could help, it would be much appreciated.

Your comics are about hyper-specific and odd things that your characters do. Are Landwolf and the other guys based on real people?

It’s a mix. Some of it is specific to things that a friend or me has done. For example, there is a scene in Boy’s Club where Landwolf wakes up after drinking a lot of beer and steps into the shower with his socks still on. When he realizes what’s happened, he says, “Fuck it,” and keeps showering. Believe it or not, that actually happened to me. Other stories I make up or get from friends. Not to overanalyze it, but I feel like the four characters in Boy’s Club represent four different aspects of my own personality. It’s also like the Ninja Turtles. Brett is Leonardo, Pepe is Donatello, Landwolf is Michelangelo, and Andy is Raphael.

What was it like doing a comic for the new Kramers and having to work at that scale?

The scale was epic. I totally shit my pants when Alvin invited me to submit a storyboard for it. Pretty much everybody in the book is a hero of mine—Ben Jones, Will Sweeney, Matt Groening, Brinkman, Johnny Ryan, Leif Goldberg—so it was a pleasurable mind boner to be a part of it.


MATTHEW THURBER

Matthew Thurber

Matthew and I wanted the interview to be spooky so we did it in a graveyard, staring up at the sky together. Matthew was in the band Soiled Mattress and the Springs and does various comics including the series 1-800 MICE.

Did you like working on the giant-size comic for Kramers?

There was a certain amount of pressure to make something of high quality. It was also physically challenging to lean over the drafting table and reach the top of the page with my wee, stunted arms. While I was working on the piece, I received troubling calls in the middle of the night from a man who would only identify himself as Winsor McKay. He kept whispering cryptic phrases into the receiver, which I assumed was advice. Words like “Mellow Lugosi. Whittle, nibble, Rapido.” Later I realized it was just Sammy Harkham, some weird thing he does—a Method-acting tool. He also had about half of the artists draw their pages under hypnosis, Herzog style. Eventually I worked on it at actual size, after some botched experiments.

Your comic in Kramers involves a man whose band broke up. Is it supposed to be about your band that broke up?

No, the story was done before our band broke up. That character is Gary Garry Beers, the bass player for INXS, who reunite in the comic to produce a final album in the underworld with the corpse of Michael Hutchence. Soiled Mattress was a great band. In Southern California and in northern Florida we achieved a level of popularity comparable to INXS. However, we became too powerful and had to be deactivated. Our act of autoerotic strangulation was to end the life of the band just as it was being perfected. Despite these similarities, I feel that we have gone on to a happy afterlife full of musical projects. Peter and Avi’s new band, Silk Flowers, is an excellent doom-synth combo.

Do you come to this cemetery often? Is this the same cemetery in your comic?

Every night to sleep. It is in my neighborhood and it is a fantastic neighborhood itself, with pyramid-shaped mausoleums as you can see. This is where the story is set, where the parrots guard the passage into the underworld. I have been trying to introduce more local flavor into my stories, to make them more hard-hitting and realistic. Think of them as being filmed on location, like an episode of Law & Order.

What do you think happens when we die?

I think the pineal gland releases a tidal wave of DMT into the brain, and we get to wander through the billion images we have accumulated in our brains during our time on earth, and probably in all sorts of fancy combinations, for what seems to us like eternity. Our physical bodies turn into mulch. 

You answered that really quickly. Are you big into psychedelics?

I have hardly any experience with hallucinogens. Maybe some gasoline mirages at the AM/PM or coffee brain spasms. Making art is psychedelic. I don’t think that you need anything else besides your own brain. Look at dreams for example—an incredible hallucination every night.


Kramers Ergot 7 is available from the Buenaventura Press website. We didn’t show you any images from it here because these interviews are all really long, but hey, that’s what Google is for.


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Comments

Anonymous, on Mar 7, 2009 wrote: i would buy this, but i need to eat this month
	reece g,, on Mar 6, 2009 wrote: buyable, but expensive man.
Anonymous, on Feb 24, 2009 wrote: johnny ryan is great, but he doesn’t seem a good fit for this, imo. his stuff works best on it’s own. i’m afraid people will take it completely out of context in something like kramers. hell, they take it out of context in vice. why wouldn’t they when it’s lumped into a massive book with fifty other comics?
Anonymous, on Feb 24, 2009 wrote: "a cool but probably unrealizable concept would be for each artist to select a director and have all the pieces put back-to-back in mini movies." that would be horrific and am embarrassment. i hope the watchmen is as good as it should be and then hollywood takes a serious break from comic book adaptations. overkill is getting closer and closer to reality here. remember what happened to westerns?
	imagine a dog eating pizza, on Feb 24, 2009 wrote: I rly wish I could spend $125 on a comic book :(
	Star Wars, on Feb 24, 2009 wrote: The point of making a book of comics is to make comicsm, not movies.
	halzer, on Feb 23, 2009 wrote: a cool but probably unrealizable concept would be for each artist to select a director and have all the pieces put back-to-back in mini movies.
Anonymous, on Feb 23, 2009 wrote: god damn god damn god damn it is so expensive
Anonymous, on Feb 21, 2009 wrote: Not sure who did the cover, but the title text sure looks like Groening to me.
	duck duck goose, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote: just in case you missed out on the mr. wonderful series in the times: www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/magazine/funnypagesClowes .html
Anonymous, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote: ryan is a rick moranis-looking motherfucker, isn’t he?
Anonymous, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote: heads up kiddos - amazon has it on sale for 100 right now if you’d rather not go through ebay. hth!
Anonymous, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote: Who did the cover art for this one? Pretty darn sure it’s not Harkham.
	DabblesInPacifism, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote: wasn’t one of harkham’s intentions with this series, and this edition in particular, to expand the audience of comic book readers? i understand the reason for the high cost, but that is exactly what’s going to keep away the new audience that i think he’s going for.
Anonymous, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote: it’s so obvious that furie uses colored pencils. i don’t know how you missed that. you should have asked ryan about his technique, because the colors don’t look done by hand to these eyes.
Anonymous, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote: matt furie kills me every single time. i love his stuff so much. who else would think of a canadian backpacking toad thing checked out a topless tweety bird lady thing? and the shit that makes it hilarious is that he totally stitched on the canadian flag so other travelers wouldn’t think he’s from america!
	The Host, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote: Johnny Ryan must be doing something right to have you guys so polarized every time his work is featured here. I will say this, he looks nothing like I would have thought.
Anonymous, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote: agreed. johnny ryan sucks.
Anonymous, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote: my god, johnny ryan is exactly as expected from reading his piece of shit comics here on vice: a pretentious half-wit who’s oh so special but reads fucking japanese kids comics. what a fucking asshole!
Anonymous, on Feb 19, 2009 wrote: Just realized Tim Hensley is in Ergot #7 and now I’m even more excited to get a copy. I mean, everyone amazing is in it, I just happen to be on a huge Hensley binge right now. In 10 years when "Wally Gropious, Teen Millionaire" is finally completed and anthologized, people will recognize his genius and maybe the New York Times will pretend to care for 10 minutes or something.
Anonymous, on Feb 18, 2009 wrote: Anonymous, on Feb 18, 2009 wrote: dan clowes has got some great doodles but he looks like someone who touches babies for a living. well, if he’s living through his characters, he’s pretty damn close to it.
	poozer, on Feb 18, 2009 wrote: is gazin himself in this? one of the preview images sure looks like his work.
Anonymous, on Feb 18, 2009 wrote: he also looks like my old landlord that keeps trying to friend me on facebook. dude can’t take a hint that although i’m active on there everyday, i somehow keep failing to notice the friend request emails.
Anonymous, on Feb 18, 2009 wrote: the images provided at the buenaventura site are gorgeous. i was surprised that matt groening is involved in this project. if anyone can tell me who did these, please share: www.buenaventurapress.com/KE7/display.php?pg=7 www.buenaventurapress.com/KE7/display.php?pg=3
Anonymous, on Feb 18, 2009 wrote: dan clowes has got some great doodles but he looks like someone who touches babies for a living.
Anonymous, on Feb 18, 2009 wrote: not only is this book put together very nicely and filled with amazing comics, it doubles as a great way to press large amounts of rocky coke back into powder.
Anonymous, on Feb 18, 2009 wrote: evil marketing genius sez: nike sponsoring a comic book. now that’s an idea.
Anonymous, on Feb 18, 2009 wrote: the ghost world flick was brilliant but art school confidential, not so much. with gondry manning the decks, i don’t see how megalomania could be anything short of wonderful.
	bonerdreamz69, on Feb 18, 2009 wrote: Harkham specifically in his interview says that he wasn’t trying to make an art book for fancy people. The reason it costs $100+ a copy is because that’s the only way for him to get anywhere near breaking even on it. Do you have any idea how much it costs to print regular-size books with full-color illustrations on each page? I will readily agree that the asking price for this book is well past my comics budget but I wouldn’t want Sammy to go into debt just so I could have it for cheaper. Or get fucking Nike to sponsor the thing or something.
Anonymous, on Feb 18, 2009 wrote: i know everyone is into crumb and blah blah but it makes sense that clowes is into him.
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