Posted By admin on October 24, 2008

INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER STANGL
By Marz Richards
October 23, 2008

I was able to grab a moment or two with Chris right as Comedy Meltdown 11 prepares for launch.

Come by the Melt Gallery on Friday, October 24 at 8:30 p.m. for fun and frolic with Dana Gould, Stephanie Escajeda, Matt Peters, Ed Greer, Ron Lynch and your host for this evening, Fred Belford.

Thanks to Linda Pine and Gaston for putting me in touch with Mr. Stangl.

What are you working on now, personally and professionally?

I did the CD art for my friend Arlen Lawson’s alt-folk project Old Man Charlie [ http://www.myspace.com/oldmancharliemusic ], and more than just an album cover, the packaging is an 8 panel experimental apocalyptic narrative and theological essay. It’s not particularly recent, but I illustrated the book The Explosexuawesome Career Guide, available from all fine booksellers, and containing dozens of exciting drawings of people on fire, stuff exploding and Don Knotts being shot with an arrow.

In between illustration tasks I’m working on a comics adaptation of a Poe story, and a true crime book about kidnapping, devil cults, and government brainwashing.

Did you engage in any formal training as an illustrator or have you just been a punk rock inkslinger?

The art courses I’ve tried to take just weren’t brutal enough about hammering technical skills into students. In college everything I saw was, like, skate and graffiti art that you don’t need training for, or, people doing abstracts without understanding color and form. I went to a public university, not a private art school, so that may be the problem. It probably shows, because I seriously need a figure drawing class. This problem starts early; high schools that even have art classes are so focused on letting you Do Your Thing and Being Creative that you never learn any skills. It’s like having the marching band play free-form jazz before they know how to keep time or play scales.

So I’ve mostly taught myself via applied study of the masters, instruction books and constant, hand-damaging practice. There’s an advantage, if you have the requisite ability to dismantle your work with a cold, dispassionate eye. If you can critique yourself cruelly, you can set your own course of study in lettering or color theory or what-have-you, which moves you to a specific goal faster than working toward a dubiously useful degree.

Who are some of your favorite illustrators or cartoonists and why do you dig them?

Jack Davis is a god unparalleled to me. Jack Davis is everything you could want to be, hope to be, and learn from as an illustrator and cartoonist. He can do everything! Hilarious caricatures, realistic portraiture, his comics storytelling is supple and energetic, his movie posters, magazine and album covers are teeming and detailed but strong and graphic. His painting is great with natural and stylized color. In his crime, horror, Western or war comics for EC or funny stuff at MAD, you can feel the grit and heat in every drawing. And nobody ever drew hands, feet, shoes as funny as Jack Davis. He did these trading cards in 1959 called You’ll Die Laughing — dumb panel gags about monsters — and each of the 66 cards is a little masterpiece of posing, color, composition and cartooning. Jack Davis is absolutely the best at everything.

It doesn’t show up much in the Comedy Meltdown posters, but a lot of the time, like in the Explosexuawesome book, I do intensely crosshatched black and white ink drawings. A forgotten master of that kind of drawing is this guy Louis Darling, who did the pictures for Beverly Cleary’s books in the ’50s and ’60s, and “The Enormous Egg” and some nature books. He drew solid, proportioned characters in really specific expressive poses, was a genius of drawing kid acting. Like, better-than-Hank-Ketchum good. And animal behavior. Every spot illustration balances big black areas, big whites, and he could go crazy rendering intricate patterns on cloth and fur and have the whole piece come out clean, effortless and appealing. He did a lot of nature paintings also, but his children’s book stuff will make you forget Edward Gorey forever!

The only cartoonist working today that can compare as a draughtsman and handling of black and white is Jaime Hernandez. He’s got some kind of anatomy and perspective computer cybernetically built into his fingers. I don’t know if he ate Harry Lucey’s brain or something, but the more stripped-down he goes, the more elegant and expressive his compositions and figures get. Also, Tony Millionaire also looks like he can draw anything without breaking a sweat! It’s easy to look at how beautifully he can draw Victorian houses and furniture and ships and things that are impossible for anyone else, but the less showoffy part is harder; the amount of feeling and dimension he packs into his funny animal cartooning is Carl Barks good.

Every issue of Dave Sim and Gerhard’s “Cerebus” has a hundred things to teach you about handling your pen, whether you’re cartooning or doing photorealistic crosshatched drawings. I can’t count how many times I’ve been saved by technique I learned by staring at Gerhard drawings for hours.

Anyone wanting to learn illustrative painting with style, taste and impeccable color sense should be hitting the Little Golden books: Mary Blair, Mel Crawford, Gustaf Tenggren. And I can’t stress this enough: Beatrix Potter is the shit. Every ink & watercolor piece in her children’s books is simultaneously cute, funny, and seriously weird, and her scientific illustrations are peerless.

Other indispensable champions and their lessons: Winsor McCay’s angelic draughtsmanship and how he cheated without the seams showing. Bud Fisher’s grubby ink work in “Mutt & Jeff”. Jack Kirby, every page demonstrating where to be fussy, where to be bold. Maxfield Parrish’s sense of composition and light quality. Jim Woodring’s ability to use sharpened technical craft to pry open irrational secret areas of the brain — probably even better than Dalí! Their strengths are in storytelling obviously, but the methods Dan Clowes and Alan Moore have developed for invisibly packing every image with interrelated symbol, thematic motif and resonant connections has been really important to me.

And you can buy most of this stuff at Meltdown.

Graphic design (uck!) and commercial illustration are in a bad place, with everything looking boring, ugly and lazy. Movie posters suck, magazines suck, even food packages suck. Just look at a ’60s Kool-Aid packet vs. a 2008 Kool-Aid packet! Disaster. A favorite modern illustrator is Tyler Stout; his color ideas are amazing, and his drawings hit a nice spot between designy and handmade. Most of the type and layout I’m fixated on is mid-century magazine ads and exploitation movie posters. I do like the forward-thinking designers the Criterion Collection employs for DVD packaging, especially Eric Skillman. Good type sense, good taste, and he can draw.

Who are some of your favorite stand-up comedians?

I tend to like stand-up that veers into storytelling and character monologue. So it’s Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Bob Newhart and Jonathan Winters records for me. That’s like Mt. Laughmore. I guess that’s not very in vogue, but Patton Oswalt and Louis C.K. are in that tradition. When they tell stories it’s like fire and blood are shooting out of their mouths. Observational and topical stand-up usually confuses and annoys me, but I love the lineage of de-constructive comedy that I think Jonathan Winters started. That continues through what Brendon Small, Ron Lynch and Craig Anton do at Tomorrow Show, and Andy Daly, Brent Weinbach, and Maria Bamford exploding what is supposed to constitute a “joke.” Bamford especially is doing incredibly complicated things with language, character acting, story structure, and performance expectation up on an Eddie-Izzard-level highwire. Blaine Capatch, Howard Kremer, and Chip Pope are some favorites for pounding an audience with a ceaseless stream of jokes.

And most of them who are not dead have done Comedy Meltdown. And if they haven’t, they probably want to.

How did you become the illustrator for Comedy Meltdown?

I think the first three shows used cut-&-paste collages of existing Meltdown promotional art. They were pretty funny and obviously some great cartoonists and illustrators have done pieces for the store, but with Comedy Meltdown picking up steam and becoming a regular event, having fresh posters for each show makes the occasion more specialer. If I were a Madison Avenue ad man, I’d say it “strengthens brand identity.” Then I would have sex with my secretary.

Producer Linda Pine asked me to do the Comedy Meltdown 4: The Quest for Peace; they needed it in a hurry and I’d done a lot of comedy and theater posters before at the Steve Allen Theater and Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. So I guess I draw funny enough for the job.

How do you work on these pieces? Do you use photo references or do you work largely from memory? Wacom tablet or pen & paper?

Being both hardcore and old school, I’m usually hunched over a drafting table with a piece of Bristol, well of India ink and slugging endless cups of black coffee. Generally all the Comedy Meltdown art is hand-drawn. Real men ink with a crow quill pen and a brush. We’ll never have another Golden Age of illustration unless visual artists remember how to shove a physical medium around on a physical surface. The CM9 poster, which was a laborious parody of the “Halloween” poster was all painted, and the Comedy Meltdown 11: Moonraker was partially painted; I’d like to paint them more frequently, because it approximates the Mad Magazine cover vibe (though I’m no Kelly Freas), but there usually isn’t much time.

I have to do most of the coloring by computer. That still feels perverse to me, but it’s a reality of these crazy robot times. Here’s the thing: it’s not particularly faster to do digital coloring than doing hand color separations. It’s just less of a pain in the ass and gives you more control over the printing process. I try to keep the wacky ugly Photoshop special effects to a minimum, and on the CM8 & CM10 posters used limited seven-color palettes in half-assed imitation of screenprinted concert posters. I’m in love with the ancient lost arts of hand lettering and sign painting, and try to at least hand letter the show titles. To keep everything as human-crafted and warm feeling as possible sometimes I’ll go back in and redraw letters to make them a little jankier, ill-proportioned, and crummy.

I try to work directly from photo reference as sparingly as possible, because it leads to a lot of bad habits. But no matter how visual a thinker you are, nobody remembers exactly what the Moonraker space station looks like AND what happens to the muscles in a horse’s neck when it turns its head AND how many ventilation holes are in a hockey mask. What I do is a lot of visual research. The Comedy Meltdown posters are loaded with as many geek jokes as I have time to cram in, and I have to check all that stuff. I spent an hour looking for close ups of the scarf Spock has around his waist in “Amok Time” before I was like “wait… does this even matter?” For the Tournament of Nerds poster, I had 150 pages of reference material to do something like 80 characters, but it’s all ultimately for purposes like “don’t forget: Thor wears tiger-striped boots! People will notice and care!”

Seriously, If I’m drawing Wicket the Ewok, I’m going to do it right.

Do you have a backlog of ideas for future events now or is it getting harder to produce the poster?

Ms. Linda Pine has named each Comedy Meltdown show but CM9 after a like-numbered sequel in a popular movie franchise. That’s helpful because I can either parody the specific film poster or the title or characters or whatevers. Plus I don’t have to start thinking about it until she tells me the title. I dunno what happens when we run out of series with an unholy amount of sequels. Probably better not think about it. There’s still Godzilla, The Land Before Time and Zatoichi.

Categories: Interview
Tags: Comedy Meltdown, Stagl