Spin Magazine: Real Life Rock Tales (feat Hot Hot Heat)

This was the second Real Life Rock Tales feature we illustrated for Spin. Apparently this ran in 2005, I would have guessed earlier, I didn't realize there was such a gap between this assignment and the Moby one.

To this day I've never heard a song by Hot Hot Heat, so I have no idea if they were a good band, an okay band, or a band I wouldn't like. I looked them up, and apparently they have reunited recently, so, if you're a fan, there you go. Their first album was on Sub Pop, which I didn't know. I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the music industry or "alternative rock" at the time, I was listening to WFMU and Godzilla soundtracks to keep me awake while working late. I don't know, I can't remember. I don't think I'd heard of the band when Spin called with the job offer. We weren't getting a lot of free CDs by 2005. Another reason I miss the zine/alt comics era. 

I dreaded working on this one because of the stuff I had to draw. Likenesses, a tour bus, a moose? Ugh. Real life stuff I avoided like the plague. Still, like the work I did for MAD, it was a good thing to be forced to go outside your comfort zone. Still, a bus and a moose? Vehicles and animals, they kill me. I have such trouble figuring out how they work (in life, as well as art, especially cars and cats). 

The script itself wasn't as tough to crack as the Moby strip, but I had to resort to horizontal panels again and do some contortions as far as the lettering and ballooning went. Again, comics written by people who have little or no experience writing for the medium can be really tough to translate to the page. very often the scripts contain panels where the visuals and text don't match, or can't even be done the way it's been written. Too much information in one panel, an angle that doesn't allow for differentiating who's speaking, things like that often creep in. I still remember tearing my hair out over the script for the page I drew for DC's Big Book of Urban Legends. The writer wanted multiple actions and points of view in a single panel, it was unreal that the editors passed stuff like that onto the artists. Any outside "real" writer seemed to get away with a lot of crap that a "plain old" comics writer would be flagged for.  But that's another subject, and another story. 

As you can see, a different writer didn't mean better U.K. dialog. Or should that be "dialogue"? "Shite, why didn't you say so?" is not a line I would have lettered if I could have helped it. "Ya rock star ponces!". Come on. Writing tip: Ask someone who knows if you're writing something you're not familiar with. And if you are familiar with it, try not to write dialog like that. It's funny, that I had to draw big U.K. brutes attacking people in both strips. Maybe the editor thought I was a go-to guy for drawing big, angry dudes from across the pond. I'm not complaining. I wish they had more of them for me to do!

The strip itself went okay, it was harder to draw than the Moby page but I had cracked the lug nut on the tire, so to speak. The first time I work for someone or some outlet is usually the most difficult, because I sweat it and worry and want to impress the editor or publisher (both, actually, and the readers). I still sweated this one, but I wasn't as uncomfortable or worried, I had one under my belt and could build off that experience. I mainly remember having trouble fitting everything in, because there were four members of a band to include, the dialog had to be wrapped around a few things, and I didn't want to cheat the bus and the damned moose. It got done. 

Some time after we did the strip I ended up meeting the singer at a Yo Gabba Gabba event at a bowling alley/music venue in Brooklyn. The band had appeared on the show, so, we had something in common to start a conversation about after Christian Jacobs introduced us to him. We talked about this and that. He was a very nice guy to talk to. He gave me his card but I never contacted him because I am scared of calling people up that I don't know. If I can fall into a conversation I can talk until the cows come home, and then I can talk to the cows until they fall asleep, and then I can talk to myself because I'm neurotic. I once talked to John Reis/Speedo from Rocket From the Crypt in San Diego (after a free outdoor show they did) and he knew my work and I said I'd send him some comics, but I never did, because he gave me his management's number and I was too intimidated and weirded out to call them to get his address. These days I have trouble calling people I do know. It's one of the things I'm working on in therapy. Isn't this fascinating? It's also off topic. 

Spin was one of the only national magazines I can remember that started covering comic books as if they weren't something for kids and lunkheads. It was also one of the outlets that hired me, but never mentioned my work in their coverage. Actually, I think they mentioned me in an article about the Bizarro Comics book from DC. I admit, it was frustrating to not be able to get any coverage in the various magazines that were willing to cover comic books in the 90s and the years before print magazines went digital-only or collapsed entirely. And I admit I was always wishing/hoping someone would notice me in print. I think Reflex reviewed one of my comics. I did get in a lot of zines, though. I always thought people who bought and read zines were more likely to buy stuff through the mail than people who read Spin or whatever. They probably got the zine through the mail, or through a trade, and that's how they picked up stuff. This is, again, a different topic. I should wrap this up. I type too much. I can type until the cows come home, etc, etc. 

I shouldn't really complain about press coverage back in the day, I guess, because getting hired by Spin or even Wizard meant a very solid paycheck, whereas a review or a mention in their pages would yield, at best, one or two sales of a comic. If that. But of course, while money is more useful than a blurb in Spin, a blurb in Spin makes you feel like you existed in the comics industry, and to a small degree, the wider world. Also, it made your enemies jealous. I never made my enemies jealous. I don't even know who my enemies are, to be honest. I think I only had one real "enemy" in my career, and that was an editor from Reflex who not only disliked me but ripped me apart in the pages of the magazine itself (and also pranked the Critics at Large strip, but that's another story, which I'll try to get to this month). That was unreal. 

I didn't really care about making people jealous. Any jealousy I've seen exhibited by a comics creator in the day (and since) mystified me (but, again, that's another topic). I just wanted to see my name and work in print so I could feel validated and alive. And maybe sell a few comics. We always hoped to sell a few comics. We still hope to sell a few comics! Nowadays I interact with people online and see nice things said about my work a couple of times a week. Still not many actual reviews, but it helps you feel like you are still viable in the industry (sort of). Like ancient gods in stories who have few followers and eventually die out, you hope to not disappear before your time comes to physically disappear. I think about this a lot as I am within spitting distance of my sixth decade on this ball of mud, almost forty of those years spent making comics and stuff. Back in the day, getting any kind of press was kind of amazing. Almost miraculous. Between the dearth of comics coverage, and the coverage usually being Dark Knight to Watchmen to Maus (or the equivalent), it was even amazing to see any other lesser-known creators or projects get some kind of national press.

Then again, as Dan Clowes put it in an issue of Eightball, a Spin editor liking your work means you suck, ha ha. So maybe I was better off in the long run.

That's not true, just a cute way to taper off the essay.  

More obscure magazine work soon, including something truly weird and obscure we did for the U.K. version of Maxim. is Maxim still around? I don't feel like looking it up. You shouldn't, either. 

See you in a few! 

The back of the page: I only know two of the acts mentioned, Bob Mould and The Dirt Bombs.  It got harder and harder to stay on top of music as we were sent fewer and fewer comps through Sarah's zines and people who liked my comics. It was fun while it lasted!