Barry Windsor-Smith

From The Comics Journal #190 (September 1996).

The Barry Windsor-Smith Interview

BY GARY GROTH MAR 11, 2013

From The Comics Journal #190 (September 1996).

This is my second interview with Barry Windsor-Smith. My first was conducted in (approximately) 1970, which would’ve made me a starry-eyed 16-year-old and (the pre-Windsor) Barry Smith a comparatively awesome 23-year-old grown-up drawing for Marvel Comics (and with an exotic accent yet!). I remember absolutely nothing of that first interview except for the atmospherics: Barry sitting on the floor of a dimly lit, rather plush Manhattan apartment, stereotypical New York street noise wafting in through the window, and me hanging on his every word. In retrospect, it must’ve seemed to me like the quintessential (not to mention, in retrospect, the oxymoronically) bourgeois/bohemian artist’s garret. (Barry told me recently that it was a friend’s apartment and that he never could’ve afforded such a place then.) Barry was gracious enough to give me a few drawings for a fanzine I published then, and we kept in touch for a couple of years, but eventually lost touch and hadn’t talked to each other until, literally, I contacted him about this interview last year.

Throughout those 25 intervening years we both apparently kept an eye on what the other was doing. Unbeknownst to me, Barry was reading the Journal through the ’80s (and tells a pretty amusing anecdote about the time he expressed approbation of the magazine to Jim Shooter). My own interests and aesthetic preoccupations moved me in a very different direction from what Barry was doing. I followed his Fine Art period when he manufactured prints and posters through his own Gorblimey Press, noted with insouciant horror his return to Marvel, was further mystified by his alliance with Valiant and had casually written him off as an unfortunate example of a superlative craftsman who was too smart not to know that he had made Faustian pacts with not one but several devils in a row. This saddened me because I remembered his kindness to me as a kid, remembered enjoying his growth as a stylist on Conan in the ’70s, and remembered respecting his move from Marvel to his serious pre-Raphaelite inspired painting. “Ah well,” I thought, “another artist who could’ve been a contender.”

Well, the good news is that he is indeed still a contender. His new book Storyteller is not just the best work of his career but, in my opinion, a major step beyond anything he’s done before, making his journey from corporate work-for-hire artisan to more idiosyncratically expressive artist one of the most circuitous in the history of comics. Admittedly, the look of Storyteller is off-putting to someone like me who has had it up to here with the infantile formalistic trappings of mainstream comics, but once I was able to set aside my prejudices (entirely justified 99 percent of the time, mind you) I recognized that Storyteller is a) his most personal work to date and b) essentially a comedy, which makes all the difference in the world. It is funny, charming, ribald, parodic, great fun, and beautifully drawn.

Originally I had intended to do a standard Journal career retrospective, but Barry preferred to have a freeform conversation about comics in general and his comic and career in particular and to let the conversation take us where it would, and that’s just what we did. The resulting discussion should prove unique because Windsor-Smith’s point of view is, uniquely enough, that of a second-generation comic book artist whose career was spent mostly in mainstream comics but who’s too self-aware and talented to continue working in that “tradition.” He’s now in the process of finding his own voice and that’s all to the best. I’ll try to get back to him in 2020 to find out how he’s done for himself. — Gary Groth

TOGETHER OR NOT

GARY GROTH: Just before I turned on the tape recorder, you said you didn’t feel real “together,” and it seemed to me that this would be the point in your career, doing what seems to be the best as well as the most personal work of your life, on the verge of a critical and commercial success, that you would feel most “together.”


BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, the commercial bit we’ll have to see about, but yes, I think I’m definitely doing the best work I’ve ever done. I think why I feel I’m untogether is ... If this stuff works out there in the field, if it’s a commercial or critical success, hopefully both, then I think I’ll feel perfectly together and I’ll be happy about it. But I’m drawing and writing and inking and coloring the fifth book right now, and I’m kind of in a vacuum.

Somebody’s always going to find something nice to say about my work, I guess, but I’ve received nothing but compliments from friends and associates: I need to hear what my critics have to say. I’ve got this hope, it’s like a really idealistic dream that this is going to work, but there’s no proof of it yet. Sometimes during the day if l get a good idea or I get something down just the way I want it to be and it makes me laugh maybe, I think, “That’s a good piece of stuff I just pulled off there,” then I feel good about it. But I tell you, there are times at 3 o’clock in the morning and I’m sitting around, because I’m a pretty bad sleeper, and I’m thinking, “Christ, what have I let myself in here for? This is really on the edge.”

So that’s what I mean by being untogether. I have faith in myself to a degree, I have so little faith in the public nowadays I have to say [Groth laughs], because I see what sells, what’s been selling for the past decade. Of course everything I’m going to say is obviously my personal opinion, but just so much of the craft of this industry has just gone down the tube, and somehow, by wicked circumstance, the sales have gone up — even though it’s been going in the dump for the last year or so. But the stuff I’m producing is the antithesis of what would be a grand commercial gambit by the standards applied today. I think it’s well written, I think it’s well drawn, it has a literary edge to it — it’s all that that don’t sell, you know [laughs]?

GROTH: Yeah, you re definitely not appealing to the quintessential fanboy who wants The X-Men.

WINDSOR-SMITH: The X-Men, yeah, or the other stuff. I guess it’s all the same thing — all the X stuff, whether it’s from Marvel or Image.

GROTH: Basically sex and violence for kids.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Right, on a very immature level. I’ve got violence in my books, but —

GROTH: [Sarcastically]: Unfortunately you’ve got humor, too [laughs].


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, see, that’s a big drag. There’s a drawback right there — it’s funny! So I’m really asking for trouble here.

GROTH: As an artist I’m sure you believe this, which also makes it a little bit more puzzling why you’re concerned about what the reaction is going to be, but as an artist don’t you think that ultimately you have to please yourself and that anyone else’s opinion is really beside the point?


WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, for one thing, “art” is such a massive term. I guess it’s just a personal thing with me that I feel if l can’t please other people, it doesn’t please me. Now, that’s not to say that my goal is to please other people. But I don’t do this for myself, you know? I certainly like to bathe in the glow of the title “Artist,” but I also consider myself an entertainer — not that that is my sole interest, either. I’m not here just to entertain; I’m here to do all sorts of things. But if I don’t capture my audience — and if I fail at either making somebody laugh or making somebody think about something, or just having somebody enjoy a drawing for its own sake or the color combination — if it doesn’t work for them, then we can call the product a failure; it doesn’t necessarily mean that I failed as an artist but simply that I did not succeed as an entertainer.

So no, I’m not out just to please myself. Not in the least. I think that’s one of the reasons why [I’ve had] such a hard work ethic over these years. If it was just for me, then gee, my work would be a whole different animal. I think there are people in this field who do it for themselves, and the rest. But I’m referring people in the commercial side of the field. But somebody like Chester Brown is doing his work for himself. He’s in a whole different field — he’s not writing The X-Men. And one can’t say his attitude is, “Well, if you don’t like it, you.” I really think that he genuinely 1) wants to explain himself, and 2) hopes that somebody, if not being entertained by it, at least can grok what he’s saying. There’s a value to that. It’s all about communication. There’s a good word. If my stuff fails to communicate, then it has failed, no matter what I did or how I did it.

GROTH: But of course that could be less your failure than the public’s failure.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Absolutely. The way I’m looking at it now, because I really do have a bit of some unsurety about the public, if I can’t make somebody laugh with this stuff, well then, they’ve got no sense of humor, you know what I mean?

GROTH: [Laughs.] Right.


WINDSOR-SMITH: [Laughs.] ’em all!

GROTH: I think that’s a healthy attitude.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah.

COMICS AND ART

GROTH: One thing you said in an interview that you gave which was not to my knowledge published was, “I can’t draw comics, or I can’t make comics, and be a serious artist at the same time because they’re such wholly different processes.”


WINDSOR-SMITH: I think that was published. I forget who I said it to. But it’s something I certainly believe right now also.

GROTH: Can you explain what you mean by that dichotomy between making comics and being a serious artist? Why do you feel that they’re mutually exclusive?


WINDSOR-SMITH: I think that probably either you have mis-remembered it, or I mis-said it at the time. But what I really should have said, which is a slight difference with one single word, is a “painter.” Because at that time — that probably came from the Gorblimey Press years — and in order for me to be able to transform myself from a fairly good comic book artist into a person who can create large easel works, as I call them, the difference in thinking, the whole difference in process, is absolutely phenomenal. There is simply no comparison. But just because a guy can drive a car 200 miles per hour at the Indianapolis raceway doesn’t mean that he can fly a plane at 200 miles an hour. You’re doing essentially the same thing, going from A to B very fast, but it’s a whole different process of thinking, action and reaction.

When I first wanted to get back into comic books after 10 or 11 years of Gorblimey Press it was simply because I wanted to tell stories again. But I couldn’t do it. I foundered totally. I had put comics totally out of my mind. The only connection I had with comic books for about 10 years was reading The Comics Journal.

GROTH: [Laughs.] No wonder you couldn’t draw comics!

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, actually I found it very depressing. I don’t know if it was so much going down all the time, or you were just raking it up all the time. [Groth laughs.] But I was thinking, “Christ, what is this bleeding industry coming to?!” But, at any rate, I simply couldn’t locate the skills I once had. I couldn’t cartoon any more. That was an absolute nightmare for me. Over 10 years I had to learn how to really draw, and the whole process about cartooning had gone utterly out of my head. Nowadays, I’ve been drawing three different titles continuously since October or November of last year, every day, that’s all I do. All I think about is continuity, pacing, staging, all the elements that make a comic book for better or worse. And you have to keep them in your head all the time. Eventually it becomes second nature, thank God, and now I can think that again.

But way back in the mid-’80s when I grabbed some old yellowed Marvel comics paper and tried to think sequentially and draw dynamically I found I couldn’t. I just couldn’t make it happen. So my good friend Herb Trimpe bailed me out on that by letting me work over his layouts for Machine Man. Then I picked it up again really bloody fast, a little bit too fast for Herbie because by the second or third issue I’d be erasing his layouts and putting in my own work. [Laughs.] But it was really like a whole re-learning process because I had become a civilian for a decade or more — I became one of those people who can’t understand comics. Do you know people like that? Who simply don’t understand the, process, the left to right, you read the balloons in sequence...

GROTH: I don’t know if I know people like that. I know people who don’t read them, but I don’t know if I know people who can’t read them.


WINDSOR-SMITH: There are many people who don’t read them. But I’m talking about people who actually can’t fathom the process; I have civilian friends who’ll give it a try because they know me, but they have no understanding of the process of reading a comic book. A girlfriend of mine who was a fine artist, a sculptor and a painter, hip to the arts, tried to read my Weapon X... [Laughs.] I’ve just put myself open to massive criticism: “Nobody could read your bloody Weapon X, Barry!”

GROTH: [Laughter.] I wasn’t going to say anything.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But she tried to read it because she wanted to know what I was up to. And she kind of looked at the page as a whole rather than starting top left. She looked at all the pictures at once, and gazed at all the balloons, probably from the middle outward or something. It’s a bizarre thing! But for some time around just 10 years ago I found myself in a similar situation of being unable to identify the graphic cues used in narrative storytelling. Nowadays, I’m glad to say, it’s as natural as breathing.

GROTH: I don’t understand the difficulty someone would have reading a comic. Do you have a theory as to why a literate person would have such difficulty?


WINDSOR-SMITH: I don’t have a theory; it’s just an alien process to some people. But the reason why I brought it up was my renewed efforts to create a sequence of drawings left me baffled, even though I had literally drawn scores and scores of comic books in the years beforehand. But I just went through this 10-year process of exorcising it, getting it all out of my system, out of my mind. So from that experience I learned a little bit about the straight civilian perception of comic books. And that gave me some perspective to realize why our field of endeavor is so often misunderstood. Along with many other things, like that guy [Greg] Cwiklik brought up in his “Inherent Limitations” piece, which I think was really well done — yes, there are lots of reasons why comics aren’t acknowledged in America...

One very essential re-perception I had at that time was just how chaotic comic-book images were, how literally ugly most of the pages and characters and colors were. By the mid-’80s, as I began looking over the current work published by Marvel I was appalled by the lack of harmony and synchronicity in the art itself. I had become highly sensitized to the aesthetics and poetry of the visual arts and all other forms for that matter, and, I tell ya, to pick up the latest Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man or what-have-you and to try to make sense of the cacophony of it all, the hopelessly bad drawing, the garish, misapplied colors and the ineptitude of the words just cluttered everywhere and anywhere — most comics just looked like colorful garbage dumps to me. No wonder the average adult cannot understand their appeal — comic books can be truly ugly and, of late, ugly appeals to children more than beauty and harmony does. Thrash metal and lukewarm punk has replaced the three-part harmony of the Beatles or even the Stones for that matter. All I could see in these publications was a riot of immature ramblings! And it’s just a bleeding American comic book I know but, quite frankly, I find such products, aimed at children, to be grossly disturbing on a level far more sensitive than the moral majority could ever comprehend.

GROTH: I have the same reaction not just to comics but to much of contemporary pop culture, but what you’re describing practically defines postmodernity, I think: fractured and incoherent displacement of traditional modes. Not that structural experiments cant prove artistically fruitful, but when they’re not applied appropriately and become a standardized approach by tenth-rate hacks, they prove the worst of each world: avant-gardism in the service of the same old . Art Spiegelman eschewed his more experimental mode when he did Maus, for instance, because he thought it wouldn’t be appropriate.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Now, Maus was so easily read. It was that box format of panels, and three pages into it, the formula was there for you, you didn’t have to think about it any more, so the narrative was so simplified, and of course the imagery, as Cwiklik pointed out and everybody knows, was brought down to a minimum of understandable images. But it was a very raw minimum. And I think that allowed certain civilians to be able to wade through it. The subject matter is something that everyone knows about, but if it was a science fiction book equally as well written, equally as simplified in its drawings, but involved space monsters, would the civilians have looked at it? Would it have won a Pulitzer Prize?

GROTH: The content was there; when people opened the book up they knew what to expect, I think, and that must have helped them get into the medium.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah. But ask yourself, if Spiegelman had done it on something that wasn’t so appealing to the public...

GROTH: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any way it would have achieved either the acclaim or the readership.


WINDSOR-SMITH: I doubt it very, very much. So it’s like a false victory for all of us working in an unrecognized field, a comic book was awarded a bloody Pulitzer. Yes and no but, not really.

GROTH: Right.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Have you seen Joe Kubert’s Fax from Sarajevo?


GROTH: I’ve seen some pages from it, I haven’t seen the whole thing yet.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, I haven’t either; I just saw the pages in CBG. I didn’t read the article or the interview about Kubert, but an immediate comparison has to be made, you can’t help yourself, with this serious subject matter of Sarajevo, and Maus. I ask myself, “Would Joe have done this if not for the success of Maus?” And Joe Kubert’s style was one of the things that disturbed me awfully about looking at those pages. Spiegelman’s style with Maus was Spiegelman’s style; he didn’t have to re-tool and re-fit himself. He didn’t have to downgrade, didn’t have to upgrade. That’s the way he does things, and it’s certainly the way he saw it and it came up with a plum. In the case of Kubert’s Sarajevo as I say, I don’t want to criticize the work because I haven’t read it, but I’m looking at the pages and I’m thinking, “Blimey, this looks like Our Army at War.” Right?

GROTH: [Laughs.] Right.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Because Kubert is such a stylist. And also he’s going for the same kind of panel things that he’s done over the years, which is his own style, and it’s very commendable — it’s not Jack Kirby window-type panels. It’s insets and stuff like this. So I’m looking at that and I’m thinking back to my girlfriend who couldn’t make any sense of the Weapon X stuff: “Why is that panel laid over that one?” “It’s just a style, that’s all.” “Oh, OK then. I’ll try and read it.” I actually had somebody look at one of my pages once, a Conan page from “Red Nails” when I was still drawing it in the ’70s, and she absolutely adored my work — she was the sister of another girlfriend of mine, she was about 18, in college or whatever, a smart kid — and she was looking at one of my original pages, a big drawing of Conan, and she asked, “Why does he got all those lines all over him?” And I said, “What?!” I was across the table so I wasn’t really looking at what she was looking at. But she said, “Well, there are lines all over his face. What are they?” I leaned over and I said, “That’s the way I draw it.” She didn’t get it. What she thought they were, were tattoos. You know that funny queer inking I used to do in those days? She thought that those lines on his face were not part of the construction of pen lines I used, but tattoos or something. She couldn’t get it; she couldn’t figure it out. I was in no mood to explain it, so the whole thing kind of shoved off. [Groth laughs.] But that was another example of how even the smartest or the most commonplace of people will look at some form of stylism and not be able to recognize it. Now, this was a stylized visualization of a man — you knew that because he had eyes, a nose, there was hair on top of his head — but what she saw were tattoos on his face, and on his arms and legs. He was tattooed all over the place! No he wasn’t— he was drawn by me! [Groth laughs.]

Now, as I say, there was nothing wrong with this girl’s understanding; she just was faced with an alien art form.

GROTH: That would tend to prove that people have not assimilated the conventions of comics.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes.


GROTH: There’s a certain suspension of disbelief in any artform — if you’re watching theater, you don’t sit there constantly thinking, “These are actors on a stage.”


WINDSOR-SMITH: Right — then you’ve blown it.


GROTH: Right. And that just tends to prove to me that people have not assimilated the vocabulary of comics and allowed themselves the distance that the necessary artifice of any artform requires.


WINDSOR-SMITH: The entire bleeding industry hasn’t put anything out over these 50 or 60 years that is going to attract the civilian to want to understand, to care enough about it to say, “My goodness, look at this: this is a whole language here that I have never even known about. And it’s an American artform — let us embrace this.” Because, as Cwiklik said — and it’s not as if he’s the first one to say it by any means — “Who the hell would give a ?!” [Groth laughs.] The content of American comic books is by and large just low-grade garbage. Who would want to get themselves soiled with this kind of thing?

Big digression. So back to the Fax From Sarajevo. I’m looking at these pictures and I’m assuming that Joe’s sincerity is deep and profound. But did Joe ask himself, “Should I draw this in my Sgt. Rock style? What is my style for Sgt. Rock? How understandable is it, except for kids who grew up with it?” This stuff is supposed to be pathetic, it’s supposed to be horrifying: the little girl getting blown up by a Joe Kubert explosion. I think that’s what I’m trying to say: It’s a Joe Kubert little girl, and it’s a Joe Kubert explosion. And there’s a sound there that’s a Joe Kubert sound effect: Ka-boom!, or some such. It just left me confused.


GROTH: I had the same exact reaction.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Good! Well, not good for Joe, but good for the point.


GROTH: Yeah, and I respect Joe very much, and I respect his drawing. And I certainly respect the kind of seriousness he wants to bring to the project. But you know, Spiegelman is somewhat of a stylistic chameleon. He tailors his approach to every individual project.


WINDSOR-SMITH: I did not know that. I’m not really that familiar with Spiegelman’s work.


GROTH: He tried to do Maus earlier in an entirely different style, a much more detailed and labored approach, which he later deemed inappropriate and he really worked hard to get that simpler style.


WINDSOR-SMITH: This is actually documented, is it?


GROTH: Yeah.

WINDSOR-SMITH: That’s very interesting. See, I thought that was just serendipity — of a natural style that fell into place at the right time. So he actually worked on that.

GROTH: Yeah, I think it was a very calculated choice on Spiegelman's part — and of course it worked perfectly, I thought.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Then I congratulate him for that.


GROTH: But the difference I think is, Joe's drawing is subordinate to his idiom, and I’m not sure the idiom he’s engaged in for 50 years is appropriate to a story about Sarajevo.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, if he’s done that in Our Army At War, then how sincere can it be? You know? I think Joe wrote this too, right?


GROTH: I think he wrote it in the sense that he sculpted it from faxes from his friend in Sarajevo.


WINDSOR-SMITH: That’s right, I just read that, of course — the guy with the outrageous name, Magic something…


GROTH: Right. But I think you could say that Joe was the author in the sense that he shaped it.


WINDSOR-SMITH: All right, then I would like to presume — and again, I didn’t read any of the balloons in those reproductions — but I would like to presume that Joe scripted this thing without the outrageous hyperbole that “Our Army at War fighting dinosaurs” had. Now, say it’s pure assumption on my part, but you’re going to be hip enough to say, “I can’t write this with lots of exclamation marks after everything. I’ve got to adapt for the sake of the content of the story.” And yet here I am looking at the drawings and I see a Joe Kubert explosion. And there is no sense of horror in it whatsoever. Because frankly I saw Sgt. Rock get blown up a load of bleeding times, and he hasn’t died, you know? [Groth laughs].


GROTH: Yeah, I remember a drawing of the family with a little girl, the mother and father, and there’s a romanticization to his depictions.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Absolutely. There was that one shot — the group of the family huddled together — and the guy looks exactly like Rock except he’s going bald, and of course Joe draws the most luxurious women.


GROTH: Beautiful women.


WINDSOR-SMITH: And he tries not to, but he can’t help himself. So here is a man who is absolutely burdened by his own style. So if he can’t step outside of what he does, perhaps he cannot be recognized as a serious storyteller, because he has a style that will not enable it. Now, just in this tiny topic of Joe’s latest work, we’ve got a whole area there that opens up so much criticism about the value of comics and what they can and cannot do.

An interesting possibility is that perhaps the serious content of Sarajevo might attract favor from critics unfamiliar with mainstream comics as a whole and, because such art or literary critics have not enjoyed Joe’s Our Army At War etc. from all these years he’s labored in our field they won’t have the same reaction we do: they won’t say I’ve seen this all before,” so perhaps an overused graphic stylism of Joe’s may be perceived as inventive and intelligent by a fresh pair of critical eyes. Could happen.


GROTH: Yeah, I sometimes wonder if knowing as much as we do about comics — too much, perhaps —could prejudice our eye. But, on the other hand, it almost seems to me that the difference between what we’re seeing in Joe’s work on Sarajevo and what we’d like to see is the difference between Hollywood and European films.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah.

GROTH: And if you look at Andre Wajda films from the ’50s, the people in there are ordinary-looking, they’re not Burt Lancaster and they’re not Kirk Douglas, they’re just the most ordinary human beings you’ve ever seen dealing with obstacles, exercising a degree of courage and so forth, and one of the problems with Joe’s work is that the characters and context look like they came out of Hollywood.


WINDSOR-SMITH: They look like Hollywood heroes and heroines. This is what was required of Joe when he started at DC. Surely Joe’s first scribbles when he was 4 years old didn’t look like the Joe Kubert we know today. So at some point he developed that style, it got stronger and stronger... I think it was actually Viking Prince which was just glorious, and very much Kubert — you can see it’s Joe Kubert even today, even though that was 30 years ago — and that was the beginning of this fluency that he has with the brush, something you can’t get around. But when talking about visuals here, what if Joe said, “Oh, this brush stuff. I’ll ink it with a crow quill. Let’s see if something more telling comes out; let’s see if I can draw something — no pun intended — out of my art that I can’t do because I’m capable of drawing and inking three pages a day of high stylism.” I would have been thrilled if Joe had stretched himself. If he thinks that stretching himself is putting down Sgt. Rock or whatever the hell it is that he’s drawing nowadays, and picking up Sarajevo, then he’s missed a point.

GROTH: Yeah, I think it was a very calculated choice on Spiegelman's part — and of course it worked perfectly, I thought.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Then I congratulate him for that.


GROTH: But the difference I think is, Joe's drawing is subordinate to his idiom, and I’m not sure the idiom he’s engaged in for 50 years is appropriate to a story about Sarajevo.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, if he’s done that in Our Army At War, then how sincere can it be? You know? I think Joe wrote this too, right?


GROTH: I think he wrote it in the sense that he sculpted it from faxes from his friend in Sarajevo.


WINDSOR-SMITH: That’s right, I just read that, of course — the guy with the outrageous name, Magic something…


GROTH: Right. But I think you could say that Joe was the author in the sense that he shaped it.


WINDSOR-SMITH: All right, then I would like to presume — and again, I didn’t read any of the balloons in those reproductions — but I would like to presume that Joe scripted this thing without the outrageous hyperbole that “Our Army at War fighting dinosaurs” had. Now, say it’s pure assumption on my part, but you’re going to be hip enough to say, “I can’t write this with lots of exclamation marks after everything. I’ve got to adapt for the sake of the content of the story.” And yet here I am looking at the drawings and I see a Joe Kubert explosion. And there is no sense of horror in it whatsoever. Because frankly I saw Sgt. Rock get blown up a load of bleeding times, and he hasn’t died, you know? [Groth laughs].


GROTH: Yeah, I remember a drawing of the family with a little girl, the mother and father, and there’s a romanticization to his depictions.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Absolutely. There was that one shot — the group of the family huddled together — and the guy looks exactly like Rock except he’s going bald, and of course Joe draws the most luxurious women.


GROTH: Beautiful women.


WINDSOR-SMITH: And he tries not to, but he can’t help himself. So here is a man who is absolutely burdened by his own style. So if he can’t step outside of what he does, perhaps he cannot be recognized as a serious storyteller, because he has a style that will not enable it. Now, just in this tiny topic of Joe’s latest work, we’ve got a whole area there that opens up so much criticism about the value of comics and what they can and cannot do.

An interesting possibility is that perhaps the serious content of Sarajevo might attract favor from critics unfamiliar with mainstream comics as a whole and, because such art or literary critics have not enjoyed Joe’s Our Army At War etc. from all these years he’s labored in our field they won’t have the same reaction we do: they won’t say I’ve seen this all before,” so perhaps an overused graphic stylism of Joe’s may be perceived as inventive and intelligent by a fresh pair of critical eyes. Could happen.


GROTH: Yeah, I sometimes wonder if knowing as much as we do about comics — too much, perhaps —could prejudice our eye. But, on the other hand, it almost seems to me that the difference between what we’re seeing in Joe’s work on Sarajevo and what we’d like to see is the difference between Hollywood and European films.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah.

GROTH: And if you look at Andre Wajda films from the ’50s, the people in there are ordinary-looking, they’re not Burt Lancaster and they’re not Kirk Douglas, they’re just the most ordinary human beings you’ve ever seen dealing with obstacles, exercising a degree of courage and so forth, and one of the problems with Joe’s work is that the characters and context look like they came out of Hollywood.


WINDSOR-SMITH: They look like Hollywood heroes and heroines. This is what was required of Joe when he started at DC. Surely Joe’s first scribbles when he was 4 years old didn’t look like the Joe Kubert we know today. So at some point he developed that style, it got stronger and stronger... I think it was actually Viking Prince which was just glorious, and very much Kubert — you can see it’s Joe Kubert even today, even though that was 30 years ago — and that was the beginning of this fluency that he has with the brush, something you can’t get around. But when talking about visuals here, what if Joe said, “Oh, this brush stuff. I’ll ink it with a crow quill. Let’s see if something more telling comes out; let’s see if I can draw something — no pun intended — out of my art that I can’t do because I’m capable of drawing and inking three pages a day of high stylism.” I would have been thrilled if Joe had stretched himself. If he thinks that stretching himself is putting down Sgt. Rock or whatever the hell it is that he’s drawing nowadays, and picking up Sarajevo, then he’s missed a point.

GROTH: Well, in theory I would agree with you, but on the other hand, if you look at their work. Lee’s work is obviously more technically accomplished than Liefeld’s, but otherwise it’s conceptually comparable.


WINDSOR-SMITH: I can’t disagree. But what I’m trying to do is allow that... People who don’t have artistic inclination — and there are a lot more out there than there are people who do have artistic inclinations — they can get married at 19 and have three children before 25, you know? They can go through a hell of a life; they could be born in an interior of an urban slum. They see more of life before they’re 10 years old than a lot of people see before they die. They see fights across the street; they see the needle and the damage done; they see everything. If they don’t have an artistic bent, they could possibly grow up being really twisted by this — I’m not saying turn into monsters or anything — but have a real deep dissatisfaction with life, have no way to express themselves, express the hurt, or express outrage. The way of expressing outrage of course if you’re in that situation is to go out and hit somebody or rob a bank, or any number of goddamn negative things. But if you’ve got an artistic inclination, even if it’s on Liefeld’s level, there’s a way of expressing yourself. Here I’m going to go and put them both in the same bag again — but I don’t think the Liefelds and the Lees, I don’t think it has even crossed their minds that comic books can be a medium for intimate self-expression. They’re sort of like fourth generation from the Kirby type of comic, from the Marvel Comics entertainment thing that, it wouldn’t occur to them that this could be a medium for self-expression. And that to me is the biggest drag of all.

And that is what I think Moebius meant. Whether Moebius is drawing that bloke who flies on the pterodactyl or doing something more obviously personal, he has a personal investment in that, and you can tell he writes from the heart and the head, you know? Of course there are some people — me for instance [laughs] — I haven’t a bleeding due what he’s goin’on about! [Groth laughs] I get lost with Jean Giraud. But same old story: if you can’t figure out the bloody story, then just enjoy the pretty drawings.


GROTH: Getting back to what you said about Lee and Liefeld not knowing that this is a medium that is capable of personal expression: by “personal expression” you’re talking about something that can objectively be determined as meaningful, that has some determinant human relevance. But, I think we’ve reached a point, certainly in the comics culture, where people like McFarlane or Lee or whoever think that they are expressing themselves. I constantly read interviews with people who talk in grandiose terms about what they do, and then I look at what they do, and it’s just absolute pap.


WINDSOR-SMITH: I … didn’t ... know ... that. [Pause.]


GROTH: [Laughs.] See, things are worse than you thought, Barry!


WINDSOR-SMITH: Goddamn. I’m just reading the wrong magazines, Gary. Are you actually referring to the Lees and the Liefelds?

GROTH: Yeah, sure. If you read interviews with them, they really think that they’re committing themselves body and soul to this sub-literate drivel…


WINDSOR-SMITH: [They’re claiming] it’s personally valid?

GROTH: Well, in a specious kind of way. I think you and I would see it as essentially spurious. But, from their point of view and based on their educational level, they think that they are exercising personal expression. [Pause.] It would be interesting to call them up and ask them [laughs].


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah. Send ’em a fax.


GROTH: I think they’re obviously also thinking they’re entertaining, that they’re providing entertainment, but I also certainly think there’s a dimension there where they’re expressing whatever they’ve got to express; that they’re being artists.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Now I know from whence came your quick-witted put-down a few minutes ago. Maybe they are actually expressing themselves!


GROTH: Yeah. I mean, when they left Marvel, there were a lot of moral reasons bandied about, quasi high-minded reasons about creator autonomy and creator rights.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, I fell for that hook, line, and sinker. I really felt they meant it. And maybe they thought they meant it, I don’t know. I don’t know why they would deliberately lie, come to think of it, because taking the moral high ground like that isn’t going to assure more sales. It’s not as if the kids are going to say, “Oh! These guys are more moral than Marvel! They’re the Moral Comics group!” [Laughter.] So there’s obviously no value in lying about it; maybe they thought they were being moral. I thought they were. And I applauded them, because I wished I had the financial wherewithal — when I quit Marvel in 1973, I walked out with maybe $150. And I spent that on my first Gorblimey print, and if it didn’t work, I would have been working at the diner. But when they left, a lot of them had a lot of money, and I thought they were saying, “Now’s the time to strike out. Now’s the time to sever the chain and throw the iron ball away. Let’s go out and do it, guys!” I mean, I was so idealistic about them doing that — and then this whole bleeding thing happened earlier this year with Liefeld and Lee going back to Marvel … Goddamn, I wrote the most scathing letter that was supposed to be a public announcement sort of thing just putting down everything about this. I never had it published, I never sent it out— I think [my attorney] Harris Miller talked me out of it: “Barry, don’t send that thing! You’re gonna get sued! Then you’re going to make my life more difficult!” [Groth laughs.] I faxed it to Frank Miller. Frank felt exactly the same way, of course, and had already made his attitude public. I guess Harris didn’t get to him fast enough … But it seems to me that they said, “Hey look, all those publishers are making all that money — let’s make it ourselves, guys!” Which is a good enough reason I suppose, just as long as you’re up front about it.


DECLINE OF CRAFT

GROTH: Could you elaborate on your lament over what you perceived as the decline of craft standards? I assume you were referring to the Marvel-DC kind of material, and their devolution over the last 30 years.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, I think we all know there are declining standards. It’s probably true of a lot of different media, you know? But then again, we have pockets of the good stuff. Thirty years ago we didn’t have anybody in the field who could write as well as Neil Gaiman. But by the same token, it was... Jeez, I can’t even imagine myself saying that there was a higher standard 30 years ago, because there certainly wasn’t — in drawing, or in academic stuff like that. I don’t know. I’ll probably really put my foot in it by getting detailed.


GROTH: There is certainly a sense where even the middling artists — I don’t know what you want to call them, “journeymen” artists, if you want to be charitable, or “hacks” if you want to be uncharitable — but people like Dick Ayers and Don Heck, that sort of middle-level artist is no longer around, and what you’ve got instead are inept kids.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Well there you are. You answered the question for me. [Groth laughs.] I don’t know if you know this, I mean, I know you made a goof once in public about Don Heck —

GROTH: Yeah, right.


WINDSOR-SMITH: But I can dig it, I can understand how you would have done that; I’d have done exactly the same as you — I’d have probably said that, and then I would have been very quick to apologize.

GROTH: Now he’s starting to look like a great craftsman! [Laughs.]


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, really! But Don Heck, once upon a time used to be a good illustrator. He’s got some comics work in print — well, of course they’re out of print, but the stuff has been published, I don’t know when, I can’t think of the dates, but it was certainly pre-superhero Marvel; I think it was Marvel comics, before they hit the big time with Jack Kirby and all that — and he had a wonderfully illustrative style: closer to top-quality fashion drawings.

GROTH: Yeah, he did romance work.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes, right. I’ve only ever seen one of his stories, and I was utterly intrigued by the beautiful drawing, the use of blacks, wonderful feathering with the brush. He used to draw the most gorgeous women! I mean, highly stylistic of course, but in that 1950s fashion sense. There was this tiny signature on the splash panel: D. Heck. I saw this long after Heck had become a hack. But I thought, “This guy really used to sing,” you know? What happened to him? Now, it wasn’t as if he was turning out six books a month for Marvel, so his average quality hadn’t gone into decline. He was only doing Iron Man or something like that. So what the hell happened to Don Heck? Well, it could be anything. I don’t know his personal history, nor do you. But could it be that it’s the same old story — that he was told to draw like Jack Kirby? Same old bleedin’thing that you’ve heard me rattle on about endlessly in different conversations. Obviously he was trying to be dynamic, he was trying to do big figures and the dynamic Kirby poses, but it just wasn’t working, because it wasn’t him. So there you have another poor wretch who fell to the demands of the early Marvel.

Now, I don’t know if I’m correct about that, this is just a guess on my part. But in regard to the new foundlings in the field: when I came in in ’68, I was pretty awful. I didn’t have a hang on anything, really. But I had gone through art school; I did learn how to draw properly. I had lots of accumulated knowledge, even for just an 18-year-old. But my comics drawing really didn’t display that, of course. But at least I was coming from the right angle … Oh, that’s so damn qualifying, isn’t it? [Groth laughs.] At least I was coming from an angle that did, in its essence, have genuine knowledge behind it. It’s been said a thousand times and it’s absolutely true: You’ve got to know the rules before you can break them. That goes from Picasso as the greatest example, to Jack Kirby. Jack knew the human figure. He knew dimension and perspective. Jack had drawn in many different styles over his career. But during his heyday in the ’60s when he would draw a leg or an arm, you only knew it was a leg or an arm because it was either coming off of the shoulder, or coming out of the pelvis. If you separated one of his Captain America legs and put it all on its own, just one single leg, no foot, no pelvis, and put it on a blank piece of paper, you’d be hard pressed to figure out what the damn thing was! It would look like a sausage from Mars! [Groth laughs.] So there’s Jack breaking all the damn rules for his own vision. But as I say, the man had the bedrock of knowledge to do that.

It seems to me what we have today is people who have not learned but have adapted. They are adapting, they are using a style of some nature that is twice or thrice removed from “pencilers” who didn’t have much knowledge about drawing in the first place. It’s just so far removed from any sort of classical knowledge. I can’t remember any of these people’s names, all the young kids: they all go into one blender for me.

GROTH: Yeah, me too.


WINDSOR-SMITH: But if you imagine any one of them reading these words, if they should even think of reading The Comics Journal which is unlikely, and imagine, them saying, “Oh what a fuckin’ old fart that Smith bloke is! He thinks we should go to art school! What an !” [Groth laughs.] So be it. But as I say, there are these little pockets of some very good talent. You’ve heard me mention Travis Charts, who does something in Jim Lee’s set-up. The guy is just fine! He has a real understanding. That doesn’t mean he’s a good storyteller however. He’s OK, but he throws so many literary red herrings into the stories without even realizing it, I suspect. So, where as he can draw, I applaud him, I pat him on the back — but now go and learn the other half of the craft, which is telling the story. I really think the storytelling and the characterization is the thing that has really gone south [mimics an old guy] with modern comics, I don’t bleedin’ know!

GROTH: [Laughs.] OK, C. C. [Beck].

WINDSOR-SMITH: [Laughs.] Yeah. It is characterization that I think has gone right out the bloody window. We can’t just pin it down to lousy drawing — however, if you can’t draw well, how can you create a good character on the page, how can you create a believable character from one panel to the next? So you can blame poor drawing to some extent. But if you can’t write well, how can you create a believable character with your words on the page? So we can also blame disinterest in writing. But really it’s the two combined, and even more so. Making comics today, it seems to me, isn’t about creating; characters or about involving the reader in a personality, and what that personality or groups of personalities are doing and how they feel about what they’re doing and what other people think about them. Instead, it’s about how cool the inanely overworked pin-up shot is. How many bleedin’ details can you stick up in the top left-hand corner before a caption goes over it. That to me seems like the very essence of what it’s about in commercial superhero comics. I would really like to read something that is - going to engage me, you know? But that’s not the criteria from Image and Marvel.

When I was doing that Wildstorm Rising thing about a year and a half ago — my one and only foray into Image — I... Well, for a start, I should never have bloody done it, and I wish I hadn’t. But I was talked into it and got kind of caught up in it, and it had to do with — oh man, it’s almost like a nightmare, only far remembered at this point — I was going through this hapless story where I couldn’t understand what anybody’s motives were. I was looking for motive. It wouldn’t come to me, I tried to read some of the preceding books and I still couldn’t find anybody’s particular characteristics — except for one guy was really big, or something like that. And then I had to draw these characters, these supposed characters.

GROTH: I assume you didn’t write this.


WINDSOR-SMITH: No, no. I mucked with the plot awfully, and the writer probably loathed me for it because I mucked around with the plot.


GROTH: [Chuckles.] He probably didn’t even notice.


WINDSOR-SMITH: No, no, he noticed. He was kind of miffed, so I heard from a third party. But I thought, “I’m just trying to improve the bleedin’ product, for crying out loud.” [Groth laughs.] But anyway, I did a real false start on it. I got three pages into it or something, trying every trick in the book to psyche myself into doing something like this. And it just wasn’t working. I was in a great depression over the story and I thought, “Oh God, this is the first time in my life I’m going to make an utter failure out of something.” After intense thinking, I realized what I was doing wrong: I was looking for characters! I know this sounds really glib as if I’m trying to build up to a funny line. But I’m really not. That was my problem: I was looking for characterization, and there was none. “There is no characterization! That’s what you’re doing wrong here, Barry!” They’re all ciphers!

GROTH: And you’re talking about characterization on the level of ’60s Marvel, right?


WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh, absolutely. We’re talking minimalism here: but at least something that we know as part of the comic book process. I mean, I wasn’t looking for Harold Pinter here. [Groth laughs.] Maybe a little bit of diluted Stan Lee. But when I realized there was nothing to look for, that’s when I thought, “OK, all right, now it makes sense!” So then I proceeded to draw the damn story.

GROTH: How did you ever get sucked into something like that?


WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh, you don’t want to know. Harris [Miller] talked me into it, you know?


GROTH: [Laughs.] OK. He is evil.


WINDSOR-SMITH: He really is. I mean, I love the guy and all that, but he gets me into trouble sometimes. He said, “This could be great for your career, Barry.” Yeah, right.

GROTH: Gil [Kane] tells me the same thing. He’s always calling him up saying, “You should do this new Image comic.” [Laughter.] Harris is always looking out for your careers.

WINDSOR-SMITH: That’s his job, he often reminds me. But yeah, I really think it is characterization that has sadly departed, whatever there was of it in comics gone by. For whatever we want to say about Stan Lee he did that thing with Spider-Man, where he actually had a point of view of the world and all that sort of stuff. So we can give him a short applause for that. And there really isn’t much of that any more.

GROTH: I don’t read mainstream comics much but we get piles of them in the office and I look at them once in a while. And because I read them as a kid and I can go back to that Kirby and Ditko and Stan Lee stuff and so on, I have this morbid curiosity about why they look like such unadulterated these days. I read interviews with contemporary creators who write and draw them and they seem to be very excited about what they’re doing. And I wonder about why the stuff is so wretched. I wonder if it’s just the Zeitgeist or if it’s just the creators themselves or if it’s me.


WINDSOR-SMITH: I know exactly what you’re saying. I have the very same wonders myself. You and I can just sit around and scratch our heads over the phone, because I don’t have any answer either. Yeah: is it the Zeitgeist? Are we missing something? Is it the same now as it was then but we just didn’t know because we were in a different position then? This sort of questioning comes to us all. It has been the standard cliché for decades now, from the ’60s with rock ’n’ roll, or at least the British invasion style rock ’n’ roll, where people would say, ‘They can’t play, they’re only playing banjo chords. Whatever happened to Ella Fitzgerald and Satchmo and hey, Frank Sinatra — now there’s a voice!” And all this sort of that I went through when I was a teenager, absolutely adoring everything I was hearing, from the Beatles to the Stones... Well, actually I was extremely judgmental even then: I fuckin’ hated the Dave Clark Five because I could see them for the no-talent copyists that they were! But I loved anything that I thought was quality, and I certainly thought Lennon and McCartney were.

I actually have this strong memory of an uncle of mine whom I greatly admired. He was a musician, played jazz. I was over at his house one day, I was only about 15 or 16, the Beatles had been around for about a year or so — at least in Britain; they hadn’t hit America yet — and he was sitting there just trashing them. Saying, “They can’t play any notes. You call that singing?” And I really disliked my uncle from that moment onward. I’ve never liked him since. Because he seemed to totally sell out himself as a musician. In other words, he wasn’t broad-minded enough to see that there is always new music. And he insulted one of my favorite things. So I’m dreadfully afraid that I’m doing exactly the same thing now!


GROTH: [Laughs.] You’re turning into your uncle.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, I’m turning into an old complaining fart. There are so many people, I hear it all the time: “Oh my God, I’m beginning to sound like my dad!” It’s a standard routine for stand-up comedians nowadays.

GROTH: But seriously, there is a maturing process, and some people go through it and some people don’t. And I think in some ways you do start sounding if not like your dad, at least like people you remember as having antiquated attitudes.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Somebody you don’t like. I can remember a long time ago, you did a major interview with Jim Steranko.

GROTH: Whew—you’re talking 25 years ago.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah. And you seemed absolutely in awe of Jim at the time.

GROTH: I was.

WINDSOR-SMITH: And you were young. And Jim was lapping it up because we know what an egoist he is. But in recent times, or at least within the last eight or five years, I can remember when you totally trashed him in print for some reason. It wasn’t out of hand, there was some purpose behind it; I forget what it was. I was thinking, “Gee, what happened to Gary in the meantime?” Yeah, we’ve all changed our taste — I guess. And now, Steranko was pretty damn good at what he did. We know it was derivative to a degree, but some of it wasn’t. So for the people who were working at that time in that heyday of Marvel comics, Steranko certainly gave far more energy to his books than your average guy. Certainly he was no genius on the level of Jack Kirby, but who the hell was? So Jim’s material was innovative to a degree, exciting to a degree, good for what it was. So why do you not see Jim’s work in that perspective? Or do you?

GROTH: Looking at his Marvel work, I can’t help but see it as thin and anemic. Whereas Kirby was genuinely original, and Ditko was too, Steranko was a compendium of graphic tricks and gimmicks picked up from various sources inside and outside of comics. So I don’t think he’s... If you look at it closely it tends to fall apart. It doesn’t hold up to very close scrutiny.


WINDSOR-SMITH: I agree with you. I was thinking that way back when.


GROTH: Yeah. Well you were probably ahead of me because as you say, I was in —


WINDSOR-SMITH: I was right in the thick of it and I was functioning in the same capacity as a storyteller. So I could certainly see through Steranko.


GROTH: Right. And l was just at the right stage to be in awe of that mystique that he carries around with him like baggage. But since then I managed to educate myself. Also I lived with him for about three months when I worked for him, and I guess I learned a lot more about him than I wanted to.


WINDSOR-SMITH: That sort of thing’s happened to me too, that which you thought once was so cool or whatever, and after a mental re-tooling due to any number of insights you realize that which once delighted you is just some sort of pap and you simply can’t understand what it was you were into at the time. And this is almost like a circular action. It comes back to your question about what’s happening to comics today.

GROTH: Exactly.


WINDSOR-SMITH: It doesn’t hold up; after you’ve gained through experience, through school, through self-teaching and analysis, what stays solidly honest to you? Even though I’ve traveled so many paths since 1968 when I first drew X-Men #53, right after Steranko’s short run as it happens, so many things have happened to me — obviously personal things happen if you stay alive long enough, but I’m talking about my perceptions of art, my needs, the things that gratify me, in fact even what art is. I’ve siphoned it through myself and I think I’ve come out a better person and an artist who is capable of realization in word and picture. Of all the perspective I presume that I have today I can’t seem to deploy it to read those old comics from the ’60s any more, I can’t read Stan Lee’s writing, it’s like getting hot pokers in the eye trying to read those balloons — see, that to me is still a bafflement. How could I ... So many things come into my head when I think of stuff like this. But Stan Lee’s writing, which used to flow through me and I thought was exciting, invigorating, stylish, any number of things... But today I cannot read a single balloon of it. And yet, the staging, the drawing, the drama, the natural intellect of Jack Kirby really hasn’t diminished, in my perception. And in fact I sometimes enjoy it all the more! Even though these are impossible heroes in blue tights. You look past that nonsense as you do when you look at a Picasso. We know people don’t have three eyes all on the left side of their head. There’s a reason that Picasso is doing this. There’s a reason for the extraction and the abstraction and the process of thought. Kirby still holds up! That wonderful guy still holds up.

GROTH: Your bringing up Steranko made me think of something vis-a-vis Kirby. People like you and I can see the virtues of Kirby I think whereas a lot of people can’t. If you only look at the surface, I suppose it’s obvious why his virtues are difficult to see, because there’s something so adolescent about it. But it seems to me that as soon as you get into a kind of attenuated Kirby, like Steranko, Buscema and others the displaced virtues of Kirby just crumble. It has to be real Kirby or nothing.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes, I agree. Perhaps if Steranko had continued to create comics instead of becoming a soft-porn distributor, perhaps he’d’ve pulled away from the early influences and become a great in the field for real instead of just in his own head. But at least Jim offered something to us in the’60s, whereas Buscema’s applications of Kirbyism was utterly vapid and empty.


GROTH: Well if Steranko’s work displayed more ingenuity than Buscema’s even then, but the way I see it is, everything we find admirable about Steranko’s work came from outside Steranko whereas everything we love about Kirby came from inside Kirby, and that’s a significant difference.


WINDSOR-SMITH: True. I’m walking a bit of a thin line here because one of my new titles for Storyteller is a direct homage to Kirby, you can tell by the title Young Gods if nothing else. I’m not drawing like Kirby, you know — the way I did in the ’60s — but my pacing and acting technique is derived from Jack. I started Young Gods about two years ago from an entirely different storytelling point of view but after I completed nearly two stories I realized that the only way I wanted to do the material was as a tribute to Jack Kirby, the characterization is not Kirby — the characters are very much my own types — but the pacing, the panel layouts, and the backgrounds are very much synthesized from Jack. I think I’m doing him justice with this because I believe I understand Jack Kirby’s work deeply. Each episode is dedicated to his memory.

GROTH: That’s an important point, though: you’re not using Kirby as a source of content so much as the scaffolding for your own content. Earlier we were asking ourselves how to account for this miserable state of affairs in mainstream comics, and quite possibly it’s because comics are being written and drawn by people who haven’t learned to distinguish between using an artist as inspiration and using him as the single source of your expression.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Most of ’em are perhaps too young to have learned the process of discriminating the valuable from the crap. You and I after all are talking from some perspective of the years under our belts, as it were. Within my parameters, my overview, say, when I was in my mid-20s, I honestly believed the comic books I was creating had value to them … not all of ’em mind you, Avengers #100 didn’t really rise above street level, y’know, but I had pride in something about those books like Conan, Doc Strange, and stuff I forget now. My drawing wasn’t always the greatest but I believe my storytelling had integrity because I had a background in books and plays and other literary endeavors that wasn’t just comic-books: Hell, I read Steinbeck when I was 14.1 don’t see intensity in modern Marvel and Image and what have you, no matter how abstracted it might be for the sake of the superhero genre, I can’t see it.

But when I read the entirety of Alan Moore’s Miracleman I was thrilled by his diverse experience and knowledge — you don’t find that depth in Youngblood.


GROTH: [Laughs.] But I wonder if maybe they just didn’t grow up reading comics … Good God, I guess it’s possible they grew up reading comics in the ’80s, isn’t it?


WINDSOR-SMITH: It is, and I know nothing about comics from the ’80s. Weren’t comics in the ’80s dominated by the John Buscema clones, art-wise I mean?

GROTH: I’m not sure, but I think it was just real garbage.


WINDSOR-SMITH: You really don’t see any evidence of John Buscema cloning in them any more. Now, John, who was a very good draughtsman, was the most feted penciler that comics had seen at that time. But for a man to have that kind of talent, that capacity to draw, or to cartoon, and yet have no intellectual basis and seemingly put nothing into those stories that you can come away with smiling … That to me was always the most bizarre anomaly, you know? He was a naturally talented man. I always compared him to Paul McCartney where Paul McCartney was obviously the best musician in the Beatles, there was nothing he couldn’t do, you know? He could play most all instruments, had a fantastic voice as regards quality and range, he was a terrific writer … He was all-round top-notch. And yet Paul McCartney’s work is vapid. He wrote some really terrific tunes every now and then I have to admit, like “Hey Jude,” I mean, God was sitting on his shoulder when he wrote “Hey Jude.” But in general, Paul McCartney gives you nothing…

GROTH. Just fluff.


WINDSOR-SMITH: He’s like the sweet tooth of music. And yet his partner, John Lennon, who could not play as well, could not sing as well, wrote some very good songs but really wasn’t as prolific as McCartney. But John [Lennon], just like Kirby, still stands up. Because there is an almost inexplicable value to what he was doing. I say “inexplicable,” but you could always try to point out what it all was, but to a degree it is inexplicable. If you’re touched with something, a vision, a hard-edge vision perhaps, even a soft vision, as long as you’ve got vision! As long as you’ve got vision and you can send it out, you can project it ... That’s what Kirby could do with aplomb, it’s what John Lennon did, it’s what a lot of people did, I’m just using two popular icons right now.

So in the case of John Buscema, he could certainly draw the human figure finer than Jack Kirby but there was just no valid intensity to what he was doing. It was just pap. And now, just recently I heard that Buscema has retired. It took me a few seconds to understand that ... How does an “artist” retire? One turns sixty-five years of age and one says to the wife ‘Well, dear, time to hang up the ol’ pencil sharpener. My time is done.” How can a real artist retire from being an artist? I understand John Romita retiring because he was the art director at Marvel: It’s a job you do and you get to a certain age and you leave that job and go fishing or something. But Buscema is an alleged artist and you can’t retire from art. So maybe John is retiring from drawing comics, is that it? Then, if that’s the case, John’s comics weren’t art. Is John now going to pursue “real art” in his latter life? Does John confuse painting at an easel with brushes and oils with the act of creating art? Buscema has been turning out comic books for 30 or more years ... Why didn’t he make them art? Look at his work, even the Silver Surfer books that were among his most facile and pretty, and you won’t find art; you’ll find a journeyman talent wasted on a field that prefers his kind to my kind.

GROTH: I actually attended a chalk talk that Buscema gave the Marvel staff in the ’80s. It must have been around ’82 or ’83.


WINDSOR-SMITH: It was at Marvel?


GROTH: At Marvel’s offices in New York and the room was full of inkers and pencilers...


WINDSOR-SMITH: What the heck were you doing there?


GROTH: I’m not sure how I got in there. Well, first of all it was obviously before Marvel barred me from the offices [BWS laughs], but somehow I wheedled my way in and I taped it.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Is that so?


GROTH: And it was the most appalling thing I had ever seen. It could have been subtitled, “How to Become a Hack.’’ He was giving lessons on how to take shortcuts and how to do work quickly.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh , really?

GROTH: And the most appalling thing about it was that it was done in all sincerity. He really thought he was teaching these people valuable job skills.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Sort of like the live version of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.


GROTH: Yeah.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Which is a book that should be burned. [Groth laughs.] I would never, ever agree to burning books, you know? But by hell, if there’s ever a book that deserves it, it’s How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.

GROTH: Exactly.


WINDSOR-SMITH: I only saw it by browsing through bookstores at the time. But we now have it in the studio as an icon. [Laughs.] So I had a chance to sit down and look at it properly one day. I was fuming! Absolutely fuming.

GROTH: I think we’ve probably said this before, but it’s tragic that someone with so much craft skill can apply it to something so vacuous.


WINDSOR-SMITH: You just said the word: he has so much craft. If ever anybody was confused — and I know a lot of people are — about the difference between art and craft, and that they do not go together like strawberries and cream, if anybody can really grasp what we’re saying here, that is, the difference between Kirby and Buscema, there’s your bloody fat dividing line. I mean, it’s a seven-lane highway, right between the two! The difference between art and craft. We said it here first.


GROTH: One thing that occurs to me is that what is explicable about art is the craft and what is inexplicable about art is that mysterious dimension that you cant put your finger on.


WINDSOR-SMITH: The spirit of it.

GROTH: Yeah.


WINDSOR-SMITH: I never saw Jimi Hendrix play, I never saw Jack Kirby draw, and these are two great losses — but I would have loved to have been near Jack Kirby physically. Not if he was doing a convention drawing, as in “Oh Jack, do me a drawing!,” but at the real times when he was really creating I’d love to have been present when he invented the Silver Surfer and when he created Galactus. He’s saying, “OK, I’m going to have this big guy who goes around eating planets.”

GROTH: Yeah, just watch him compose pages.


WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, and feel... I’d literally be a fly on the wall because I know he was supposed to be a very outgoing man, but I doubt very much that when he was on that level of creativity, that people were around him, or could watch him. It had to happen in private. It’s too energetic. It’s too... It’s close to genius is what it is. Inside our field, it’s as close as we’re going to get for a bloody long time it seems. And I would love to have just been able to suck in, feel the energy, the spirit coming out of him. God, talk about being bathed by God’s light or something. This is back to what you were saying about the palpable and the non-palpable when it comes to art — I as a person wouldn’t have been able to understand and translate his power, because it’s entirely his own meta-energy. But it’s like you don’t have to understand what the sun is and how it works in order to get suntanned. I would have liked to have gotten a slight brush, metaphorically, of the heat that must have come out of Jack Kirby when his mind was really, really roaring. And to think he could translate it onto paper, with a stubby bleedin’ pencil to me is just one of the all-time gases of this world. And we are very lucky that we were around and at an impressionable age when that stuff was coming out.

THANK GOD FOR COFFEE

GROTH: Speaking of craft, I just read the third and fourth issues of Storyteller and one thing I luxuriated in was the immaculate craft.

WINDSOR-SMITH: You think so?

GROTH: Yeah, and I’m referring not just to the drawing but the storytelling, — the writing, the timing, the pacing...

WINDSOR-SMITH: Thanks.

GROTH: It all comes together beautifully.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Thank you very much, Gary.

GROTH: I know where you got the drawing from: you studied academically and of course Kirby was a big influence. But the first writing that I’m aware of that you did was Archer and Armstrong, I think.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I wrote Weapon X before that.

GROTH: Oh yes, and you might have written some stories for Epic.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah.

GROTH: But nothing as complicated and as slick as Storyteller. I’m wondering where you learned the craft of writing — who your influences were, and how you actually sat down and learned it.

WINDSOR-SMITH: It wasn’t Stan Lee. [Groth laughs] I always should have been writing my own books. I didn’t get sucked into Marvel comics in too many ways. I didn’t fall for the hype... I mean, I did for a while, but after a couple of years I was out of there. I didn’t become a hack, thank God. One of the things I did fall for with Marvel Comics — and this is even before I joined the company, as a reader of them back in London —was the team effort. Stan and Jack. Roy and John. I accepted that as pretty much the rule of things.

GROTH: Collaboration.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, that’s how it worked. And I’ve always regretted my going along with that. Over the years with all these bleeding comics I’ve drawn, usually I was the storyteller, I was the director of the story. I don’t think there has ever been a case where I worked from somebody’s story where I didn’t change it in some fashion or another. This made some friends for me, and it made some enemies. I know Chris Claremont was always pissed when I would change his bloody stories. And I would write dialogue on the sides of the pages, often quite a lot of which got swiped by the scripter and he took the credit and the money was his. But I always just took a back seat in that regard, although I never really verbalized it that way to myself. I was always so bloody disappointed when things didn’t go … I would look at my pacing and my characterization, like body language or a certain turn of the head or raise of the eyebrow, which was always fairly subtle compared to something like Jack. And then I would read the words that had been written to it, and I said, “ , that doesn’t say what my figure was implying!” The only other time it really worked was when the supposed writer, the scripter, would follow what I wrote in the margins. Then we would find this balance of acting and script, stage direction and everything. I’m not saying that was always the case, Gary, but it was enough of the case for it to really stick in my craw over the years. So I started scripting my own stuff around the late ‘80s, I did a couple of short stories, I did a funny story with Ben Grimm, an April Fool’s joke story which everybody still seems to covet in some way. That was the first comedic story I ever did. And I worked on that thing the way I’ve always worked on stuff: I never told anybody what I was doing. I never asked for permission from an editor, like, “Do you mind if I do this?” I’d just go ahead and do it. If they didn’t like it, then, “ it. You don’t get it then.” Luckily this thing was a major Marvel character, and it was funny. What it was as a matter of fact was a tip of the hat to the old Kirby-Lee things where Kirby and Lee would do funny adventures of Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm. It was kind of like that. And I still like it today. The drawings are a little bit queer, but … It works. And I felt satisfied.

Many of my stories that I wrote and drew have never been published. Certainly during the '80s when I was hardly being published at all, I was turning out tons of bloody material, which I was writing and drawing. I’ve really learned the craft, the kind of storytelling craft that you see now in Storyteller from all that work that’s never been seen by the public. I allowed myself to fail miserably and to triumph with something all on the same page.

I learned, for instance, a very simple process that works perfectly for me, which is: Don’t draw. Write only. It is the words that are important. And it is. Frankly, in Storyteller, to be perfectly honest with you, the quality of my drawing has gone down a bit from the immaculately inked works of the ‘80s because I am turning out 32 pages a month here. Along with running a studio, I am drawing, inking, writing, coloring, and making all the business decisions that I can, etc., etc., all in 30 days! I mean, where the do I get the energy for God sakes? Thank God someone invented coffee.

GROTH: [laughs] Are you actually doing 32 pages a month?

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah.

GROTH: [Long pause.] Jesus.

WINDSOR-SMITH: It’s big stuff. The first book is 42 pages. But yeah, it’s 32 pages from there on. There are no ads in this book. It’s full right from the start to when you fall off the last page. It’s all story.

GROTH; I’m worried you're going to have a heart attack any day now.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah... Don’t say it! [Groth laughs.] It’s close to the truth. No, no, I’m in seemingly pretty good health, considering I never sleep. But the unpublished '80s is when I learned to put together all the bits of craft that I’d learned in the '70s and the '60s. I learned to draw better simply because I was under no pressure from anybody. I mean, I went broke doing this, you have to understand. I was very poor in the ‘80s. I did quite a stack of covers for Marvel, none of which I signed, mostly for the New Mutants book and I also produced the occasional comic that got published, but the crappy money from those X-Mens and stuff paid the rent and not much else. But what I was doing behind the scenes was writing. Learning to write my way. I’ve never written a play, but I shouldn’t be surprised if I’m capable of it because I’ve read enough plays that I understand the process and have a deep love for theater. I wrote a screenplay during the late '80s, it was never bought but it was an invigorating experience that I’m still quite proud of. In comics you have to think visually as you write, you have to think stage presence, and you have to think left and right camera work. These are part of the rules in theater and film. And yet, it’s very rare, if not perhaps unknown, that I can read a comic book, including my own that’ve been scripted by others, where I felt that there was an utter complete unison between image and word. The balance I’ve always dreamed of having is where you can make it flow so easily — and this really to me is the Grail for me — where I can make my reader forget they’re reading a comic book. That’s what I aim for all the time … y’know, like in the movies — if you notice the architecture of the theater during the film then the story didn’t take you away. If I do something too flash with my visuals, I will chuck it out and do something less flash, because I don’t want anybody to say, ‘Wow, look at that cool drawing, man!” I want it all to balance. There’s a word I’m looking for, I can’t bleedin’ think of it. It’s some word about perfect balance.

GROTH: Unity or harmony?

WINDSOR-SMITH: Harmony, yeah. Some Zen harmony thing. [Alex Bialy yells to Barry from another office.] What? “Synergy,” right, thanks! ...What? “Synchronicity.” Another bloody good word. I know it seems like I was a penciler and inker and colorist for the longest time, and suddenly I’m a writer, too. But the fact is, I took a whole decade off to learn how to balance the craft of storytelling. Because I just hated that I could do such nifty drawings of characters who you really couldn’t believe in, because they’ve got all these ridiculous costumes on, and yet I could draw them so well, that you really had a sense that they could actually be flying or whatever. And then the bleeding words would be attached to it, and the whole thing would go out the window into the comics-language ghetto of impossibly long speech balloons where the character exposits on something that should’ve been plain as day by the visuals and where nobody stops to breathe in-between sentences or ever goofs up their words: In one of my first stories (that Ben Grimm thing I mentioned) Ben is so flabbergasted by a trick Johnny Storm played on him that Ben speaks (yells actually) a spoonerism. My editor on that job called me up and asked if I meant to do that! Can you imagine?! How on earth can one write a spoonerism unwittingly? A spoonerism is an oral gaff! Of course I meant it!

GROTH: It seems to me that one of the essential requirements of a good comic is the seamlessness of the writing and drawing, where the writing and drawing in fact become a single component, if you know what I mean.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, I think that’s the ultimate goal. I can draw as flashy as anybody. I can draw 10,000 little gadgets and lots of big guns and all this sort of just to say, “Look at my pictures!” Again, going back to the old whipping post of Image Comics, and their doing the group thing, the team thing, it seems to me like they’re all onstage — I know I keep mixing music with art and comics and all that, but it’s a continuing metaphor for me — that they are a group, like a rock band, onstage, and they’re all trying to be louder than everybody else. [Groth laughs.] Jim [Lee] goes up to nine, so Cherris goes up to 11. “Please notice me —I am louder! I can play faster!” “Listen to that guy, he’s actually shouting rather than singing!,” because he wants to be heard over the guitars which are all now being played at 11. That is not a concert. That’s the perfect word: “concert.” Nobody is in concert.

GROTH: That’s a perfect analogy.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah.

I want my characters to be alive to the audience, I want them to care about the people I draw. If one of the characters does something stupid, inane, or wonderful, I want them to feel stupid with the character, I want them to feel wonderful with the character. This to me, is the essence of storytelling. It’s Charles Dickens. He was just words on a page, sometimes his stuff was illustrated, but sometimes I think actually the illustrations were an intrusion, because the illustrator of a Dickens story wasn’t quite good enough. We’ve seen plenty of popular authors who’ve been illustrated — everybody, from Burroughs or whatever, to John Tenniel doing Alice In Wonderland. I never liked Tenniel’s drawings for Alice. She never looked like the Alice I imagined. So I found Tenniel’s illustrations an intrusion. When Rackam illustrated it, I thought, “Yeah, that feels nice.”

But I’ve always felt that illustrations in a prose story get in the way somehow. I’ve never seen the perfect balance. Maybe there is, I just haven’t seen it. But with comic books, we are obliged to find the perfect balance, because that’s what we’re doing! That is the very essence of what we’re doing. And if I may be so bold, I think that one of the many, bleedin’ reasons why we as an artform haven’t been recognized in America as something valid, is because of that lack of symbiotic balance. How can an ordinary person, a civilian out there, pick up a copy of WildCATS or something like that, and say, “Oh yeah, this is engaging to my sensibilities as a human being?” Because the very essence of the thing implies that you’ve got to read it, it’s got word balloons on it after all, but who in the adult world wants to get tied into the doings of a bunch of vacuous superheroes firing giant guns at each other? Comics can be stories about real people no matter what colors they wear if only the essence of real people are injected into the stories. All I see of late is pageants of outrageous color and costume draped all over the place to thinly disguise the lack of depth or anything remotely similar to drama. There’s got to be a balance somewhere. And it’s very rare that I’ve seen that balance in comic books. At least on any sort of sophisticated level. And that’s why my book is called Storyteller. It’s not called Barry Windsor-Smith Illustrator or Bingbangboom. It’s Storyteller.

I like to believe that it’s those creators who can write and draw with equal passion that will give this field the recognition it needs; it’s those people whose intent it is to tell a story and not just make pictures. Frank Miller is an excellent example of this. I wish Neil Gaiman could draw! Mike Mignola is now the sole author of his work with Hellboy, David Lapham. Rude and Baron are an example of almost perfect teamwork, however — they must sit on the same stool at the same desk as they’re putting Nexus together.

HUMOR AND DEPTH

GROTH: One thought that crossed my mind when I was reading Storyteller is that it seems to me that the best artists in the history of comics either had the capacity for humor, or that their work was dominated by humor. I’m thinking early on of Kurtzman and Eisner.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh right, of course.

GROTH: And then Barks would qualify. Jack Cole.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh yeah.

GROTH: And of course later on in the alternative and underground field, people like Crumb and Shelton.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Right. I think you’ve got a fairly good pattern going there.

GROTH: And I wonder why that is. To get back to our whipping post, one of the characteristics of Image Comics is their humorlessness.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Absolutely. Not only is it humorless, but it’s so arid, it goes beyond that. It emanates from the printed page just how seriously they take themselves. Which is so bloody ironic.

GROTH: So earnest.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes, earnest. I don’t know if I could ever apply that word to our whipping post.

GROTH: And someone like Kurtzman was a great humorist, and he also did moving, serious stories in the war books.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Absolutely. If Kurtzman was only a comedian, let’s say, there would be no depth to him. Some of the best — oh , I’m going to quote myself from one of my stories, which I hate doing — the best, the funniest people, are the people with a hard edge. If you’re Soupy Sales, I mean frankly, I’ve never thought of Soupy Sales as funny. Admittedly I wasn’t around as a child when he was doing that stuff, and I know he really did do it for children, but he still does comedy for adults, and I never saw anything funny about it. But when someone like... Oh , I can’t even think of one bleedin’ comedian right now… [Alex yells to Barry again.] What was that? Dennis Miller. You like Dennis Miller?

GROTH: Yeah, yeah.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Hot , you know? He’s as funny as all get-out. I very rarely laugh out loud, at anything for that matter, and I don’t laugh out loud at Dennis Miller. For one thing, he talks too fast and if you laugh you miss something. But the stuff is so hard-edged. It’s bitter, it’s angry, it’s perceptive, it’s everything that bleedin’ Soupy Sales ain’t. I think Miller really stands out above the crowd — he’s got his own crowd, and he’s even higher than that. I think that if Kurtzman was a Soupy Sales, if he was a comic, comic artist, a funny guy, then he wouldn’t be very funny. And if he was only a serious bloke and he only did war stuff, only did the nit grit, then it wouldn’t be that memorable. It isn’t just two sides to the story. It’s multi-faceted — and I know that’s walking into cliché. But it’s like if you meet somebody on the street, or if you meet somebody at a cocktail party: are they funny? That’s good, that’s entertaining. Have they got something sad to tell you? Or are they funny once they have a sad look in their eyes? That’s always the best thing. But if he’s sitting there being funny and he’s got a down’s nose on, it’s not so damn funny any more, you know?

GROTH: Which brings us to the fact that there is an unde lying seriousness to your work in Storyteller.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh yeah, sure.

GROTH: And I just started to realize that with the third and fourth issues. It is starting to coalesce.

WINDSOR-SMITH: This is not intended as a comedy... It’s not slapstick by any means. Everything has ... Well there’s The Paradoxman, which is grotesquely serious. I’m only just beginning to get some minor humor into that one with the fifth story. But the other two, yes of course, the characters don’t take themselves too seriously, thank God, and they do do quite ridiculous things. But again, it’s looking for that Zen balance. I don’t know if you got the story where I reveal that Axus The Great [from The Freebooters] is going through a mid-life crisis. It’s the one where Strongbow, the young strapping guy comes into town.

GROTH: Sure, I remember it.

WINDSOR-SMITH: It’s Axus’ pet peeve. Not necessarily Strongbow, but all of these youngsters who’ve come up behind him since he retired from being a roustabout. And they’re all making more bleeding money than he is, and they’re all still handsome and have got 22-inch waists. There’s not a little bit of biography in this.

GROTH: [Laughs.] I was gonna say.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, sure! It’s also true of so many other things I’m doing. The Aran character from the same title, is me also, when I was younger. The stuffiness of Heros of Young Gods, where he’s slightly aloof to keep up an image bestowed upon him by others, that’s also me. It’s all biographical. Even the women — I have a very strong female side, as a person. I like to make people laugh, but I’m also a very serious sort of person. So that’s how come these characters come alive, because I’m tapping into my own experiences and my own energies.

GROTH: There were two panels in the fourth issue of the “Freebooters” storyline that I thought was strikingly auto-biographical, and that’s when an apparition appears before the young guy, and he says, “I understand you fully. I once was like you — so impassioned about so many articles of life.” [BWS is laughing.] And then he says, “But needless to say, that was before I discovered villainy. In these later years I realized that idealism and all its feckless trappings is but a path to delusionment and misery.” [BWS laughs.] And I thought, “Hey, that’s Barry!”

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, on the money.

GROTH: In fact it’s both sides of you.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I was speaking from experience. But you must understand that I spoke like that once upon a time: I no longer feel that I have lost myself. In case you didn’t get it, and I certainly wasn’t going to put it in explanatory captions, that guy, Uta Prime, is a split personality in the most literal sense. Which is why you find him arguing with himself suddenly. It’s going to come out much later. One of my pet-peeves about comic books is, one should try to tell the story as best as one can, and thus, one will not need “Meanwhile, back at the ranch”-type captions. As far as I know I’ve never written an explanatory caption.

Uta Prime, he’s been around in my canon of material for about 15 years by the way. I did a story that was never finished and thus never published with this very guy. He didn’t have that name then, but he looked exactly the same, and it was a suicide story. It was an eight-page story of him literally just arguing with himself. He would stand with his body weight on his left leg, and he’d be saying something or other, and then he’d flip his body weight on his right leg and he would argue with himself. What it was was, there were two personalities inside one body; one was a good sorcerer, and one was a truly evil sorcerer. The good sorcerer was trying to argue his way out of not wanting to be in this body any more: “I don’t want to be a part of your evil villainy any more.” And then of course the nasty guy is just calling him names and all sorts of stupid stuff. And the good side realized, by something that the bad side said, the way out, the way to be free. And that was to kill himself. So even as the good side was ripping himself to pieces — it’s the most ghastly piece of suicide you’ve ever seen, literally ripping his ribs out— the bad side was saying, “Stop this! Stop this! What are you doing? Ow!” [Laughter.]

So that’s where the Prime guy comes from. I knew when I wrote that little chapter there that I was going to confuse the out of people! The guy seems to have a split personality, but I’m not explaining anything.

GROTH: And you shouldn’t.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I’m hoping people get the drift, but if they don’t, I’ll follow up with another story at some point where they will get the point. But yes, that whole thing about the articles of life... Yeah, that came right out. That kind of stuff just falls off the pen.

OPENING CHANNELS

GROTH: I think I read somewhere that you said you actually write the story first and then you draw it. You don’t write page by page as you go along.

WINDSOR-SMITH: True. But I re-write as I draw.

GROTH: Now, I assume you have all three stories running in those 12 issues plotted out.

WINDSOR-SMITH: It was a necessary item really because when I was showing the stuff around, I mean, it was a bizarre concept: a big, fat book... There were a lot of things that publishers — including Harris [Miller], I have to say — just didn’t understand what I was going on about. I’ve never had to do a major sell on anything. But I realized, “Well, crumbs, if it’s going to be that bizarre sounding to publishers, I guess I’m going to have to do a hard sell.” So I sat down — literally, I sort of chained myself down to do it — and wrote out the complete stories: The Paradoxman, The Freebooters and Gods, knowing full well that what I was suggesting to any given publisher wasn’t going to be what the it was going to be. I was just making the up as I went along, just so it seemed as if I had it all wrapped up. But I knew very well that once these characters started to come alive, that they’re going to tell their own story and how on earth can you sell a story, a book or a movie by telling the Man “Hey, gimme some money — the story’ll work out in the end.” We’ve got a situation now where the Young Gods have been sitting on this bloody planetoid looking for dragons for three bleedin’ issues!

GROTH: How far ahead do you actually script a story?

WINDSOR-SMITH: You mean as I’m working?

GROTH: Yeah.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I write it day to day. On a good day I can write four pages. But I genuinely mean this: I really don’t know what’s going to happen from one morning to the next. I honestly don’t.

GROTH: What I actually meant was how far ahead of the drawing do you write the story?

WINDSOR-SMITH: It just depends upon the flow. I know that if the characters are really on the ball — and I really do see them as separate creatures from myself— if they are really interacting with each other — I know you’ve heard this from other people, and I don’t know if it’s bull or not, but in my case it isn’t bull — I am hard-pressed to get everything on paper that they’re saying. I have to write so fast, I do all my scripts by hand. I’ve got computers and all sorts of bloody things but the essence of writing with a #2 yellow pencil on a yellow pad to me is so intimate. I can’t sit at my word processor and do it. I like to hear the scratch of the pencil on the paper. And sometimes I have to write so bloody fast just to keep up with what they’re all saying. Especially if they get into an argument or something where they’re all talking at once. I will go into certain shorthand which is personal to me, not proper shorthand. And if I’m open enough I’ll catch as much of it as I can and I’ll just keep going. If something slows down it might be a flaw in the character. It might be a red herring in the story. Or it might be any number of things. But as it slows down and I don’t have to write so fast, then I’ll grab a piece of pre-drawn up paper and start whacking in figures for their staging. This happens all day every day around here. Not to say there aren’t times when I draw a blank. I think when I go blank on these characters it’s because I have fallen into the trap of imagining that I know them well enough to think I can coast with them for a while. If I am missing something and I slow down, I think it’s me. I think I don’t have my channels open to them, you know? Because a certain number of these characters have become so strong, even just within five books, they really do dominate the stage a lot — especially like Adastra, the elder princess in “Gods,” she is such a strong personality.

In fact I’ll tell you this because, why not? She took over a story in Chapter 5 of Young Gods, I thought I had that pretty well worked out, it was one of the short chapters because it wasn’t the lead story for them, and it was about six pages, and she totally took over the story and the staging and everything. I know it sounds like I’m loony toons here, Gary. Don’t think that I’m thinking, “This happens all the time to everybody!”

GROTH: No, no. I was going to ask you how spontaneous you can be as you write and draw these stories.

WINDSOR-SMITH: It’s how spontaneous they are, really. Again, I’m just here trying to catch as many of their words as possible. Anyway, she just bleedin’ walked in and took over the whole story. And the story did not go as I had planned. She really had a bee in her bonnet and started shouting at Strangehands, and I’m drawing this thing thinking, “Crumbs! This isn’t what I wanted to do! She’s really coming off like a now! , she is a ! She isn’t even being charming about it any more. She’s getting on Strangehand’s case because he’s smaller than she is.” So I had to stop the goddamn story. It was lettered and everything. And it took me days to figure out how I can let these characters take over the stage like that. I just slammed it down and for a couple of days I did something else, asking myself, “Should I really let this go? Aren’t my readers really going to dislike Adastra now because she was such a bloody ?” Sometimes it feel like I can’t control them. So I thought about the story for the longest time, and I started it all over again. But what I did was, I had an imaginary conversation in my mind, telling Adastra, “If you keep this up, I’m not going to give you your fan mail any more.” — like I’m a fuckin’ lunatic, right?

GROTH: [Laughs.] Right.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Arguing with my own characters. So what has happened now — and in fact I’m telling you, but nobody in this building knows about it yet; I guess Alex is going to overhear this, and my letterer is going to go nuts when she finds out — we are actually going to publish the story of me walking into their stage to talk with Adastra about her overt personality [laughs wearily]. I don’t know how I’m going to pull this off, I really don’t. But when I was trying to tell Adastra that she’s going way too far, she was arguing with me too — and I’m the bloke who created her! God, anybody who reads this thing is going to think I’m out of my mind. [Groth laughs.] [Note from BWS: as of August 15, Adastra and I worked it all out amicably as can be seen in Storyteller.]

But really, this is the act of creation. I mean, you’ve got to believe in these people. So she’s got this whole bleedin’ attitude towards me now. So I thought, ‘Well, this is what’s happening with the characters. If they can step outside of themselves, let’s see if I can pull it off, in print, without it seeming phony.” I mean, this is a real test. If it seems the least bit phony, or like one of those “Stan and Jack walk into the story” things, the “Aren’t we being cute?” thing, then it’s not going to work. So ... [laughs] I don’t know. . So we got two chapters here. They both start off with exactly the same themes. And yet one goes batting off in a different direction, when Adastra gets crazy; and the other one is now written and drawn, and I kept very tight control on it, and this was after I gave Adastra a bit of a dressing down. So now that I’ve gotten the one that I wanted out of the story, I’m going to go back and make the sixth chapter the one where Adastra charged on stage and started dissing poor old Strangehands. It’s a crazy loony toons sort of way to do things, Gary, but...

GROTH: But what you re describing seems to me to be a very important and vital part of the creative process, where the process itself creates new possibilities.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Hey. You just said it perfectly.

GROTH: That’s what I was curious about, because I assume you have some sort of an outline for the stories.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I’ve got an outline.

GROTH: And what I wanted to know was how much you deviate from that.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Continuously. I never really know. As I say, it’s up to the characters. From the very first moment that Strangehands said to Heros, “Let us go chase some dragons” — which is sort of like saying, “Let’s go to the gym.” Because the guys really uptight about getting married, he’s afraid of fatherhood, he’s still a virgin, as is his wife to be. And he’s freaking out on the evening of the wedding. So it’s sort of like saying, “Come on, let’s go toss some balls down at the gym,” and kind of get that male energy running. So he says, “Let’s go chase some dragons,” because they’re flicking gods after all. I thought they’d be chasing dragons by book #2. I’m not very good at drawing dragons — I don’t know why — but I was gathering reference for dragons. Who does the best dragons? I finally landed upon some fairy tale type dragons from Arthur Rackham, but I need them to be bigger and chunkier and more Kirby-esque, so I’ll make it a balance between the two. So, back in February, I’m preparing myself for book #2 because I’ve got to draw a bleedin’ dragon. Well here we are at book #5 in the middle of the summer, and we still haven’t seen any dragons! And this is why Adastra is so annoyed: she came along on this trip because Heros and Strangehands promised her dragons!

So really, it’s not as if I’ve got that much control. I will put my foot down when things go utterly wrong, but generally I’m letting these people tell their own story. Unless they get lazy. Then I’ll sort of prompt them a bit, like a stage director ... I can see it now: “Comics Journal interview with That Out Of His Mind Guy: Barry Windsor-Smith.” [Groth laughs.] You always imagined it over the years? Well guys, here’s the truth.

HOW HE GOT FROM THERE TO HERE

GROTH: You have a fascinating and anomalous career trajectory. You grew up in the assembly-line industrial system of mainstream comic, the tail end of it, before the enlightenment so to speak, before undergrounds really hit and established the concept of comic book artists exercising the rights of traditional authors, the concept of creators’ rights came to the fore, and so on. Then you self-published under the Gorblimey Press. So you’ve straddled both of those worlds. I’m interested in how you got out of the former. During the period you started Gorblimey Press, you and I weren’t talking much but I had the impression from my understanding of what you were doing and your public statements, that you really turned your back on comics and you were embracing what you felt was more serious art. And then you got back into comics by doing Machine Man, which sort of shocked me because I couldn’t reconcile that with my revised conception of you. And then you went on to do Weapon X, the Wolverine story, which I also thought was an artistic dead end for you. Now finally it seems to me that you’ve come out the other end — you’re doing the most personal work of your life. But it took you a while to get to that point.

WINDSOR-SMITH: It really did. This might be a matter of naming the wrong party or something, but when I left Marvel, and essentially by that left comics, I wasn’t saying that comics stink; I was saying that the business stinks. I’ve always loved comic books and always will, obviously. But it was the business, it was the publishers that were so disgusting to me. And all of my idealism was crushed by those publishers. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they were pussycats compared to some of the people around now today. It was just the most unidealistic, non-romantic place to be, yet my entire outlook was through the eyes of a romantic artist. I was lucky to get Conan so I didn’t have to draw superheroes, with a guy who doesn’t wear a cape and spandex. I was able to put more humanism into those stories because he didn’t fly and he wasn’t omnipotent or fire bolts from his fingers. So that was good for me. In leaving the field, it was a wholly idealistic move toward my freedom. At Marvel I was restricted by editorial and commercially placed policies that I considered inane and hypocritical.

Here’s a little anecdote that might explain the absurdity of things I dealt with at Marvel — In one of my latter Conan books I devised a short sequence where, if I recall correctly, Conan is frustrated in his interest in a woman, and as a device to enhance his sense of frustration and annoyance I had a dog, a street mutt, following Conan and barking at him. Eventually Conan kicks the bloody thing and it runs off. I created that sequence directly from my own experience.

Roy Thomas called me when he received the pages and complained about the scene because, he said, Conan just wouldn’t do that. Conan wouldn’t kick a mutt that was pissing him off. It was OK for The World’s Most SAVAGE hero to hack men to meat but, in Roy’s overview, he’d never kick a dog out of sexual frustration!

The sequence stayed in but I hated being taken to task for being original and perceptive. I’m still the same way: I can’t stand anybody telling me what to do. I can’t stand anybody taking a moral stance against what I do, because I think of myself as very moral — even though I am the type who will bend any rule that has been made, sometimes just ‘cause I wanna, there’s no other reason.

When I was doing my own thing for 11 years even that had it’s negatives. I put out one picture I thought, upon reflection, so bad, and so lacking in everything that I had intended it to be (even though I have to say it was one of my more facile works, it wasn’t raw like a lot of the other stuff I did), that I would lose sleep questioning myself over and over how I came to the point that I couldn’t discern its faults. The problem was, it sold terrifically well. It sold just as well as the pictures I did that were truly heartfelt. Suddenly I was beginning to get confused about my muse. Even within the freedom of my own choice, I found that I was suddenly faced with another dilemma: I’d proved, unwittingly and without intention, that I can sell a lousy picture — or what I thought was a lousy picture. So then I thought, “Hey, this means I can publish all that that I didn’t want to publish before because I didn’t think it was good enough!” Because actually I painted far more pictures than I ever published because they didn’t rise to my critical standard, or whatever, so they would never be published. All these things started to happen, so the whole damned idealism started to unravel for me, you know? There’s this other bloody awful thing: I would sell the reproductions of my pictures as cheap as I could, and I genuinely mean this. We would make a profit but we didn’t get rich. And there were other people out there imitating me who were selling their stuff for more money, weren’t selling as many as me because they weren’t me, but they were making more bleeding money than I was! [laughs] So this was really getting on my tit, as they say.

So I was faced with this thing: the public really didn’t understand what was a good picture and what wasn’t. There was no way I was going to start trying to teach them. All I wanted to do was give them my best, and hope they could tell the difference between me and Frank Brunner or who-the-hell without having to search out the signature. And I lived in that idealistic lie for a long time. When I found I could sell a piece of work just as well as something that meant so much to me, then it seemed like everything started to fall apart. Now, it didn’t fall apart overnight; it was just something that started to gnaw at me over the years. And eventually the muse started to fade, she started to go away because I no longer had the faith that kept me driving along.

And this thing about Machine Man, yeah, it surprised the out of me too. It just happened to be there; I didn’t even know what Machine Man was. I didn’t know it was one of Jack Kirby’s lesser characters. And Herb Trimpe told me that it was going to be a really great series like Blade Runner, and I thought, “ , that sounds good!” And of course it was nothing bleeding of the kind.

GROTH: So you were seriously naïve.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh, absolutely. Sure. , still am.

GROTH: Even after 10 years of The Comics Journal, Barry? I feel like I haven’t done my job here.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I can remember there were years — this was two or three years after I had really given up painting. I wasn’t making any money at all and I was absolutely, bloody broke. The only way I was making money was by selling originals, both paintings and old comic book pages. That’s how I managed to live, and I didn’t live very well. There were times when I could barely afford my rent, and the days seemed to get longer and longer and murkier and murkier and I was getting really confused about what the hell it was I wanted to do. I worked with Oliver Stone on his first film and came back from Hollywood completely disillusioned with Hollywood.

GROTH: The Hand.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Right. And I was lost. I was lost spiritually, mentally, financially ... And that went on for a couple of years. I was imagining that I could still draw comic books. But as I was saying, my only connection with comic books was reading The Comics Journal. And God, you depressed the out of me, you bastard! [Groth laughs.] Certainly there were times I wanted to write you and say, “Cut it out with that bad news ! Isn’t there anything good happening?!” And my other connection with comics was that I was good friends with Herb Trimpe. But we didn’t see each other much, he lived about 40 miles down the road, he has a family and I didn’t. So when this Machine Man thing came along — he already knew that I had been trying to draw comics again, just for myself, I wasn’t talking to any companies or anything like that. I was just trying to see if I could do it again. And I was hopeless. I had no sense of rhythm. The whole damn thing was useless. So Herb said, “Look, why don’t you work over my layouts? That will help jump-start you.” And to this day I thank Herbie for being so gracious about it all. It was great of him to let me do it, and furthermore, when he saw me after the first issue just tossing his pages out wholesale and doing them all over, he got a bit upset, and I know he did, poor sod. 'Course it was kind of a blow to him. And eventually I just took over the whole series: I wrote the last story and I was never credited or paid for it. I pretty much took over all the characters and directed the stories from book #2 on. But that was the jump-start that helped me begin to understand the process of comic book storytelling again.

The reason why I wanted to get back into comics was in fact because of The Hand. Because, like so many comic book artists, I’ve always had this desire to be a moviemaker — because it’s a whole lot bleeding easier than writing and drawing comic books — and being out there in Hollywood with Oliver [Stone] and the whole damn thing, I was thinking, “Christ, this is even more bleeding cutthroat than Marvel Comics!” And I didn’t think that could happen! [laughter] So, total disillusionment for me.

In fact I had the option of staying on in Hollywood after the movie was over because I had a bit of money from doing that picture so there was certainly no shortage of cash floating around. But I thought, “Oh, screw this. At least there’s a devil I know in comic books, instead of a devil I don’t know.” Because I was up all over the place in Hollywood — using the wrong terms, I was literally bumping into the walls, I was so naive to the moviemaking process, and the politics of it and the money involved and the kind of people you have to kowtow to. None of that was in my taste at all. It’s disgusting.

GROTH: What is the nature of your naiveté? I’m a bit puzzled by that because you’re an intelligent guy, you’ve got very forceful opinions, you’re strong willed ... I mean, you couldn’t have had illusions about Hollywood could you?

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh, sure. Certainly naiveté is the word, that’s perfectly correct, but I think something that makes it a little bit more on the money is my romanticism. I romanticize everything, everything in the world — except war or cancer or something. I mean I know dem’s bad things! I know dat! But I’m just such a bloody romantic about everything.

GROTH: Yeah, that could be dangerous.

WINDSOR-SMITH: It is but I’m always going to be that way. I’ve gotten enough scars on me that I know not to pickup that hot poker the wrong way ‘round again, you know? I’ve got caution nowadays. But I still romanticize to such a ... I’m a romantic fool, Gary.

GROTH: [Laughs.] That explains it!

WINDSOR-SMITH: That’s actually my strength as a creator — but it’s my downfall as a guy walking along the same avenue as everybody else.

GROTH: When you got back into comics, you proceeded to ally yourself with some of the biggest sleazebags in the business: Valiant and Malibu.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, blimey, yeah. , talk about naive, yeah. [Groth laughs.] Valiant was... whew. Wow, did I ever fall for that one hook, line, and sinker. You may find this next statement preposterous but Valiant was a better company when Shooter was guiding it. I know how you feel about Shooter and I feel that much of your criticism is valid but, y’know, there are sharks in the water that get eaten by bigger sharks still. I was riding downtown with Jim and one of his loyal assistants and for some reason or other I brought the Journal into the conversation, I’d suggested TCJ might want to do an article on the new Valiant or something or other. The loyal assistant said “But Gary Groth’s such a sleazebag!” “No he’s not,” I replied he just calls a spade a spade.” Our conversation in the cab ride dropped to a menacing silence. Maybe that’s why Shooter didn’t trust me after that; I’d heard from grossly unreliable sources that he wanted me fired from Valiant: Me, the only real creator they had!

As you probably know, I called [Valiant President] Steve Masarsky “Saddam Masarsky.” Never better an epithet was overlaid on another human being! Saddam Masarsky … Boy, when that first rolled off my tongue by accident, and it was literally an associative thing — I thought it was a real hoot! I’ve never referred to him as anything else since then, and now other people call him Saddam too, which always gives me a giggle.

GROTH: So you had a real blind spot to the kind of cutthroat mentality that pervades business.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh, yeah. Listen, I can be lied to just like everybody else. Even though at the time of this Valiant thing — I mean, I turned out good work for the company, that was one of the good things about it, and I learned that I can carry a story all on my own, I don’t need a second-rate writer to put in second-rate words for me, I can do it myself, thank you very much. [Groth laughs.] So that was a positive thing that came out of it. And the other positive thing really, trying to stretch the philosophy a bit, is that... [he pauses, then laughs.] Oh, I just got a laugh to myself. I was just thinking, “I’ll never be that stupid again.”

GROTH: [Laughs.] Words that will come back to haunt you.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Words that are going to come back to haunt me probably by this afternoon! But let’s be generous and call it a “learning experience.” So I came out of that with more scars ... But no less ideal, I tell you!

GROTH: Well, you had a lot of learning experiences.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, oh yeah.

GROTH: Twice at Marvel...

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yep. If I were smarter, I would just take one blow from one protagonist and then move on to the next protagonist. But sometimes I actually go back to get hit again. [Laughter.] Maybe I just don’t think I’m learning enough. But at this point in my career, I keep as much control over everything as I can. And I’m in relatively good hands with Dark Horse.

GROTH: Relatively good hands at Dark Horse? Why the qualification?

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well... I can sort of nod and wink about that one over the phone, can’t we? I don’t want to say anything derogatory about my esteemed publisher, or his wonderful outfit.

GROTH: Could you talk about publishers in general?

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh publishers, publishers, ...

GROTH: A necessary — or even an unnecessary — evil?

WINDSOR-SMITH: They are a necessary evil. I certainly know — and I mean this truly and I’m honestly not vacillating here — but Mike [Richardson] absolutely adores my work and I’m very proud of that. He has always wanted to publish me … You know, Gary, this is probably something I’m going to write in.

GROTH: [Laughs.] OK.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Over 30 or so years I’ve known only varying degrees of villainy from publishers. But, although Mike Richardson has not fully lived up to his promises to me as yet, I have to say that he is the most authentically sincere publisher I have met at this time. Stan Lee was such a showman, a carnival barker as you depicted him on one of your covers, that there was no question that he had tricks up his sleeve and that you’d never get your monies worth if you believed his megaphone hyperbole. Saddam Massarsky: two parts Richard Nixon to one part Fagin. What a mix: everything about Massarsky’s body language said shyster/lawyer to me.

GROTH: At least you have an attorney to play hardball you now.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Right, I have an attorney. It’s not as if I’ve not had legal representation before but they’ve never been comics-hip y’know? And Harris [Miller] is a gas, he knows far more about my work than I do, he’s got a memory like a computer and his favorite character of mine, out of the hundreds I’ve created, is Starr Saxon from some Daredevil story I concocted in 1968! Harris is terrific but he can be a little old lady, too — and you can print that because I don’t care and he’ll just chuckle anyway, I call him a little old lady all the time. “Stop whining, Harris, you ninny!” [laughter] But he always gets back at me somehow — usually by kindness, you know? [laughs]

GROTH: That seems a little underhanded of him!

WINDSOR-SMITH: He’s a devilish manipulator of Romantic fools, he really is. But anyway, Harris is helping lead me along here, and I’m learning a lot more because I’m keeping my eyes open, I’m keeping my ears a bit more open. And the thing about the stuff with Storyteller is, this is my big investment. It’s still entertainment — I’m not telling the story of my life here — well I am to some degree, almost every one of my characters, be they male or female, have something to do with me, one of my many complex sides, you know? So there’s a lot of self-expression going on and some of these characters have been with me for 10 years, or even longer. I’ve been developing them slowly over the years. So, I don’t want to sound too melodramatic about it, but if Storyteller doesn’t make it, I’ve got nothing else to do in this field; I’ll go somewhere else.

GROTH: Well, l can’t imagine that it’s not going to be pretty successful.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, look at the situation. Paper costs more, distribution — look at this whole distribution situation, you know? If this thing holds even for a while, then it will carry on. But this couldn’t be a worse time in this field to bring out such personally-oriented book of a nature like this. I mean, I’m sitting here looking at three beautiful color posters of three of my characters, and they don’t look anything like the stuff that sells at Image, I’ll tell ya. Not even close. One guys overweight and the other girl barely has breasts. And there are no big guns anywhere!

GROTH: I would describe at least two of the three strips in Storyteller as screwball comedy masquerading as genre.

WINDSOR-SMITH: There you go, pretty good. Can I use that line? I’ll put a little “G.G.” under it so everybody knows.

GROTH: Yeah, “G.G.”

WINDSOR-SMITH: Right, got it.

GROTH: The only work of yours in the past that seemed to presage this was the Archer and Armstrong stuff.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Because I thought I would never get to the stage where I thought that the Freebooters, which had a different name in those days, called The Journals of Aran, or something, I never thought I would ever get to the stage in my career where I would be able to pull this sort of thing off all on my own. When I was doing Archer and Armstrong I just started to adapt from a 10-year-old set of characters — characters from what is now called The Freebooters. I thought this was the only way I could get that kind of material out in front of the public, this sort of humorous stuff, fairly sophisticated adult-oriented humor. So I’m actually sorry that I cannibalized myself on that. But one of the things it did prove to me, Gary, was — this is a very upbeat point — when I was writing and drawing Archer and Armstrong, regular people, regular folk started reading my comic books! This is kind of mitigated by the fact that the guy knew me anyway, but nevertheless, he’d never read comic books, and he had heard about Archer and Armstrong, he was the partner of my hairdresser, Sergio, a real sweet guy. And I was having Rita do my hair one day — what’s left of the bleeding stuff [Groth laughs] — and Sergio said, “I really love Archer and Armstrong.” I could have jumped through the ceiling when he said that! He’d heard about Archer and Armstrong, and it turned out it was by me, of all bloody things. He always knew I was a comic book artist but he never knew what I did because he wasn’t into comics. So he started collecting them! And he was telling me, “That scene, so-and-so on page three had me cracked up!” And I just felt like a trillion dollars! I felt like I had made the biggest breakthrough ever. I’ve always wanted the common person to read one of my books and be able to understand it and even laugh at it or something, you know? It was an absolute fabulous thrill to me. In fact, to tell you the truth, I thought he was having me on for the first 10 minutes. [Groth laughs] I thought he was just being really wry with me. But no, it was true. He had heard about this thing from somewhere else, this comic called Archer and Armstrong that adults could read, so he goes ‘round, buys the comic, and says, “Christ Al-bloody-mighty! It’s by that customer of Rita’s!” He couldn’t believe it, what a coincidence.

GROTH: It does feel especially gratifying when someone who’s not a congenital comics fan reads a book...

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, yeah, it’s a gas! I still get a thrill every time I think about it, and this was probably five years ago. I visited the comics shop where Sergio had bought the book and I puttered about looking for anything interesting. Eventually I gave up and just bought a copy of my own work, Archer and Armstrong #5 or something, as I had no copies of it. The lady behind the counter said “You’re gonna love that, it’s the best comic on the market. It’s hilarious.” I autographed the cover and handed it to her, thanking her for her support. Before she had a chance to question me I left the store. I was grinning to myself, I tell ya. This is what I’m hoping for Storyteller. I used to get letters from Archer and Armstrong fans who just didn’t read comic books, but they adored Archer and Armstrong. Because they weren’t being written down to.

GROTH: The big obstacle is finding those people. Because they don’t go into comic book stores because they don’t read comics.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I’ve got all these fancy plans — whether they come to life, I don’t know, it’s all down to the bloody dollar as it always is — but I want to advertise ... We’re advertising in Wizard, you know? I mean, , OK, do it. Advertise in Wizard, why not? Wizard is about comic books. But that’s preaching to the choir. Why not advertise in college newspapers? Advertising by itself really isn’t going to mean that much, but if I could put a really good joke in a college newspaper, something that doesn’t insult somebody’s intelligence, or a really pretty drawing that has that attractiveness that is somehow universal. Sometimes I come up with pictures that are universal — not all the bloody time. It’s kind of hit and miss with me, kind of like Neil Young songs, you know? He’ll come up with a song that will absolutely touch the whole world — and then he does something else that everybody thinks is a piece of dreck. So I had this ideal idea, which again, is on the shaky basis of money, of advertising Storyteller in entirely different mediums. And also if I could just keep going long enough. My first contract with Dark Horse is for 12 issues, and if I haven’t picked up some new and original readers inside of 12 32-page issues, that have more toilet jokes than you can shake a stick at — [laughs] I’m just joking. No actually, I keep doing toilet jokes and I wish I wouldn’t — that’s what comes from growing up in England with Benny Hill on the TV.

GROTH: Well, that’s the thing that’s going to sell it.

WINDSOR-SMITH: [Laughs.] It might. It certainly isn’t going to be the big guns. I try to elevate myself slightly above toilet jokes if I can, but I’ve got to admit there are a lot of them. I’m just hoping I’ll find whatever vacuum was left when Archer and Armstrong died. I’m hoping to find those people again. And I’m going to need even more than that to make this thing a winner. I mean, I need this thing to last for the rest of my career. This is all I want to do.

COMMERCIAL SUCCESS

GROTH: What kind of sales are you talking about in terms of it being a winner? What do you look forward to?

WINDSOR-SMITH: To break even?

GROTH: Yeah.

WINDSOR-SMITH: It’s very, very low. It was probably my naiveté, I don’t know, but I was looking at at least 100,000 for the first issue, and my publishers aren’t looking at anything like that, and they know more about this than me — they’re looking for half of that. And I’m thinking, “Crumbs, it’s 50,000 — that’s going to be considered a success?”

GROTH: That will be considered a raging success, Barry.

WINDSOR-SMITH: That will be a raging, bleeding success. So, what on earth has happened to this field?

GROTH: It collapsed.

WINDSOR-SMITH: My hope — it’s a thin one — but the hope is that it will build. I know that certain good commercial material, certainly stuff that’s coming out of Dark Horse, has built an audience. Like Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. The first three or four issues I don’t even think they broke [even], but it’s built, so I’ve been told, and now it’s in a healthy sales rate — all comparative, of course. And that thing has fairly high publishing costs, it’s full-color, blah, blah, blah. So that’s a good sign. Because I think Hellboy is a really neat little comic book. And Mignola is just transmogrified from it. He used to be this sort of Marvel done thing a long time ago, but he just got better and better and better. And even though his scripting is minimalistic, there actually is some depth to what he’s doing. Because it isn’t just out of his head; it seems like he’s pulling imagery and sensibility from somewhere very arcane ... Whereas Charles Vess is actually illustrating all the stories, all the scenes, fairytale, stuff like this, in a very mundane way, as if you’re supposed to understand everything about it. But it seems to me that Mignola is just acknowledging old folklore and going his own way with it. I admire it for that. I think it’s quite a strong book.

GROTH: I think you have one thing going for you and one thing going against you in the book. When l got the package of the first two issues, what put me off initially, and I’ll be entirely honest with you, was the genres. One was science fiction, one was sword and sorcery, and one was a meta-mythological context. I thought, “Well, this is going to be a very serious Conan-esque thing. “I was unenthused. But as soon as I recognized the book’s humor, I couldn’t stop reading!

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh, fabulous. I’m glad to hear that.

GROTH: Now, I have a feeling that the public is going to feel exactly the opposite.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh. [Laughs.]

GROTH: They’re going to be real excited because it’s the genre material that’s sort of standard comic book genres —

WINDSOR-SMITH: But wait a minute, Gary. Why would the public be excited about standard stuff?

GROTH: Because public appetites are habituated, and they want to see the same thing over and over.

WINDSOR-SMITH: But [what is] standard stuff? For one, there is no sword and sorcery stuff out there, so that’s not standard, and the Kirby-esque book, Young Gods, there’s nothing like that out there because Kirby doesn’t exist any more. So what is standard nowadays? Of course it’s what we continually use as the perfect put-down: the , the guns ... Even the very fact that Image comics have such a high-end production look to them, you know? What I’m doing with Storyteller is going the absolutely bloody opposite way. All these things are hand-painted.

I could be very slick at times if I want to, but I have no interest in being slick whatsoever, so I let my brush show. I don’t know if you know all this crap about when hand coloring comics editors tell you you should never let the reader know that somebody actually did it that way, as if it should be magically colored somehow — to which I say, “Bull .” If I get splashes of paint on the , it stays there! [laughs] It isn’t quite that bad; I’m not being sloppy for slopp’s sake. I’m just trying to make this thing as gritty and real, as opposed to admittedly these absolutely fine effects that I see in Wildcats or something like that. That has some absolutely fabulous production, but it has no soul to it. God, I sound old-fashioned when I say, “ like that has no soul!”

GROTH: [laughs] The old-fashioned humanist.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, humanism. That’s the thing.

GROTH: Completely out of fashion now.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Totally out of fashion. So that’s the risk here. So anyway, I don’t think people are going to be excited that this is like genre.

GROTH: I think they II be more open to it than if it weren’t. But on the other hand, I also think that fans are such cases of arrested development that they want these contexts to be steeped in seriousness.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes, I know. Getting back to what we were saying at the beginning of this: how can you sustain an entire industry when your audience is that ... I can’t think of an adjective! ... that imbecilic? People of good conscience are sitting around scratching their heads asking, “Why can’t we break through? Why haven’t we broken through yet?” But look at our bleeding audience! This is the audience that we have attracted! We created that audience, the comic book industry as a whole. If the audience is , it’s because the product is !

GROTH: Yeah, but also we’ve seen maybe the most creatively mature comics ever published over the last 20 years. And we still can’t break the perception among the public that the comics are sub-literate kids’stuff. My son went to Children’s Hospital yesterday, (it wasn’t too serious), but one of the funny things I noticed as we were on our way to the pharmacy was a wing for kids who stay overnight, and each of the rooms are labeled outside the room with titles like “Respiratory,” and so on, and the labels are in word balloons. And why are they in word balloons? Because word balloons means comics, of course, and comics mean kids’stuff. [Laughs.] So this observation was going through my mind even as I was preoccupied by my son’s inability to breathe. But the prejudice against comics is so widespread, and it seems impossible to change. My biggest fear if I were you is based on the fact that the work you are doing now is clearly the most sophisticated work you’ve ever done, and it’s going to appeal to an older, more literate readership, which of course comics don’t have in huge numbers.

WINDSOR-SMITH: This is the big risk in trying to find an audience, rather than working for an existing audience. I’m doing it to hopefully create an audience.

GROTH: And that is a risk.

WINDSOR-SMITH: The biggest risk I’ve ever taken. But you know what? I haven’t got any choice either. I’m not saying I’m doing this because I have no choice. I’m saying that, once I realized that that’s all there is, because I can’t do Machine Man again, I can’t fall to that anymore. And I can’t be Gil Kane in 25 years’time saying, “Golly, I wish I’d have done something more valid. Look at all the books I read, too.” If that happens to me, I’d rather die before I get old. But then again, when you think about it, , I think about what Gil said — he was trying to reach another audience with Blackmark.

GROTH: In his time he was certainly, trying to reach a different audience and trying to break out of the commercial boundaries the comics industry created.

WINDSOR-SMITH: There was actually more of a chance in those days than there is today.

GROTH: Do you think so? Even with something like Maus out there?

WINDSOR-SMITH: It just seems like there’s so little choice today. Because it’s all been boiled down — once it was a soup, and now... You know what a “reduction” is? When you’re making a sauce you have to reduce, you have to keep reducing until you’ve got some formula, some consistency. And the potpourri of comic books, or the possible readers of comic books have been reduced to the gross cliché that is everything you see from Image Comics. No matter whether it’s competently drawn by Jim Lee or the most inept thing you’ve ever seen, which is a large portion of what they put out, and for that I loathe them -— I mean as a unit: I don’t dislike any of them personally. But what they’ve done is, they’ve turned the worst of Marvel and turned it into a very smooth paste indeed. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t help people like me who are in the commercial side of the field but want it to be better.

GROTH: When you say the “commercial side” of the field, are you making a distinction between a commercial side of comics and something else?

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, oh sure. I’m not driven by money by any means. If I was I wouldn’t do what I do. But I am looking for success, I need success. That’s why I mean commercial. On the back of Storyteller you’re going to see one of those little bar codes, you know? I figure I could get away with that because obviously my intent is honest enough. But I don’t see being commercial as being the death knell of anything. As long as you just don’t fall for the bull . If you think about rock musicians — I mentioned Neil Young, but John Lennon, whomever, people of integrity — whose music is full of integrity for better or worse. It just depends upon one’s taste. But their music is conveyed through a commercial process which is CDs or records. That’s what I mean by me being on a commercial side of it. If I wasn’t commercial in anyway I’d be doing little black-and-white drawings and self-publishing probably, and probably at a loss. And telling the story of my life, of which there is much to tell. Explaining how unsympathetic I find the 20th century, or whatever. That would then be non-commercial.

MISUNDERSTOOD

GROTH: Toward the beginning of this interview you said something to the effect that “If the work I was doing was just for me, then gee, my work would be a whole different animal.” I’m curious as to what kind of animal that would be.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I honestly don’t quite really know. Sometimes I scare myself ... I’m capable of a lot of things, artistically. I write an awful lot of material that is never published, and it’s not intended to be. Admittedly, since the advent of Storyteller I haven’t really drawn a great deal for myself. Drawing for me, manipulating the pen on paper, is commonplace, it’s like breathing. I do it all the time and I really don’t think about it any more. Now that I’ve found this venue — or I created this venue I should say — where I can put together all of my things that I do graphically, I’m perfectly glad and happy, and relieved, to be able to harness all of this material and make it palatable. Within my judgment, I’m not pandering to anybody. But there have been many, many times where, when I create simply for myself, I do not do the sort of things that you see published by me. I mean, I’ve seen people’s sketchbooks, and often what they’re drawing in their sketchbooks is what they’re drawing in their comic books for cryin’out loud. So why the hell do you have a sketchbook? You do those sketch things at the back of the Journal, and unless I’m mistaken, I don’t think you’ve really done sketchbooks by the big professional comics types. You usually go for the more...

GROTH: ... more obscure.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Obscure. So I’m not really surprised by what I see because I wasn’t expecting anything. I’ve often wondered what John Buscema’s sketchbook looks like — to go back to that thing for a while.

GROTH: Assuming he does drawing that does not generate cash.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I assume that he’s a professional artist right there and then and probably puts the pencil down at five o’clock. Picks it up at 8:45 precisely.

GROTH: That’s right. So what do your sketchbooks look like?

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, as I say, they’re certainly not like anything of mine you’ve seen. I haven’t done sketchbook work for quite some time...

GROTH: [Laughs.] I can’t imagine you have time to do sketchbook work!

WINDSOR-SMITH: Quite so. If you have a natural ability to create marks that mean something, a sketchbook for me was pretty much like scribbling in a diary, quite literally almost, page for page. I’ve got sketchbooks from the early-’70s right through to '88, '89. I really don’t like looking at them. Sure there are some nice drawings in there of projects, the original drawings for Pandora’s hand, a study or something like that. And I’ve got plenty of nice drawings like that. But it’s when I let my mind flow. We all have our dark side — and some of us darker than others. I definitely have a dark side. And I would give that dark side free rein. At this vantage point, 1996, looking back on certain pages of a sketchbook of say, ten years ago, I would look at this stuff and say, “My God! Was I depressed then?” I’m saying that it’s a graphic depiction of depression. Not somebody holding his head with tears coming out of his eyes, or anything so inane, but it could be just as much as a few scribbled lines on a page, or one line on a page. And it’s that spirit that comes out. There is a word for this kind of stuff, I’ve forgotten what it is, some multiple-ology sort of word, about how one can project one’s spiritual sense on an object or whatever. It may be pure idiocy for all I know, but I did hear a word once that described that. Because I was telling somebody about it, and they said, “Oh yes, that’s so- and-so-ology, isn’t it?” But*now I’ve forgotten what the word is. But I can literally open some of those sketchbooks and still get almost exactly the same thoughts crash back into my head — even though they were ten or more years gone. And if I hadn’t opened that page I’d have completely forgotten how I’d felt or what I was thinking at that precise moment that I scribbled something, that is indecipherable to anybody else but me. I’ve always found that to be fascinating. Have you ever picked up an antique and felt suddenly forlorn? And you don’t know why?

GROTH: Mmm-hmm.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Or you’ve walked past a house and realized that something happened in that house — and I’m not saying something like a B-movie, where everybody was slaughtered or something. But just get an ineffable sense of something...

GROTH: Sure.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I’m glad you understand that. I could say that to a half dozen people and they’d go, “What the is he talking about?” I know that stuff happens. I can’t explain it ... But my sketchbooks — especially because the ‘80s was such a dark period for me — are filled with darkness.

GROTH: Why do you think that the subject matter or the context that you established in your sketchbooks wouldn’t be appropriate to be published?

WINDSOR-SMITH: I’ve thought of this often ... that I’m not really being true to myself. There is a validity to that material, I do strongly believe it. And because I’m not letting it out to the public, am I sort of being coy? Am I afraid? Am I afraid to let people know how I really feel? Or — and this is just as valid as anything else — am I saying to myself, ‘Well, that’s how I was. So why do I need now to bring it up again?” But I’ve thought of it often. Often, when I’m looking through things like RAW or more personable comics ventures, I think, “Gosh, I really understand how that guy feels.” Not by what he’s written, and not by the unison of what he’s drawn and written. But how the heck he did it. Something about how he did it. And I always find myself being moved — I’m not saying this in a good way or in a bad way — but it touches something. And that’s the spiritual thing that you really can’t deny. Well, you can and many people do. Most people deny this stuff continuously. They think it’s getting to vapors, or they think ... God knows what they think. But a lot of people — from my experience — will just get scared when they think of anything that’s outside of what you can see and smell and touch right in front of you. When I do this sort of thing, there is no academic quality to it at all. These are drawings, but they’re not what I normally do. These works are not my controlled self. Certain friends of mine have seen this stuff, certain intimates, and naturally they’re probably the same intimates who know the dark side of me. So there is a certain safety, because they already know me, as I know them.

GROTH: You re clearly investing yourself — or part of yourself — into the work you’re doing right now with Storyteller. But it also seems as if you require a certain commercial mash that you have to shape it into a commercial mode to be comfortable.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Possibly. But as I said to you, Gary, I’m not pandering in any way.

GROTH: I’m not suggesting you are. My point —

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, my sense of this is, Yes, I do want it to be commercially successful, but if you don’t like it, well, you. [Groth laughs.] And I’ll go ahead and do something else, but I won’t do it for you; I’ll do it for me.” But what I think it is, is possibly a fear of losing control. That sounds right as I say it. To make yourself naked, to really show yourself, warts and all, to use that stupid cliché — that takes a lot of guts. If that was the only outlet I had, if that was the only way I could do it — like Mike Diana. Now, here’s a guy...

GROTH: He has no inhibitions whatsoever.

WINDSOR-SMITH: No inhibitions, and he has a lot of natural talent, but he has little learning. He doesn’t have craft, except for what he’s sort of picked up here and there. But this sort of ruling, this edict, that he may not draw comics again that came down from the court — you can’t imagine how that makes my head spin. This is Orwellian. Or worse.

GROTH: Yeah, it’s ugly. And probably unconstitutional.

WINDSOR-SMITH: The thing is, with Diana, that is his method. That’s his method of exploring himself and of explaining himself, you know? Of course we can’t help but say, yes, it’s unfortunate to some degree that these images are so radically disturbing. But he’s a child of our culture. And he lives in Florida for crying out loud! [Groth laughs.] So people should be looking to themselves; not toward Diana but at the culture that Diana was born into. And people who judge him should judge themselves first. I know this sounds absurdly Biblical, but there you go. The thing is that that’s Diana’s only outlet. Me, I have got many levels of outlet. And the controlled stuff, the Storyteller, the other gear that I’ve done over the years, is for me, more satisfying at this time. I would like to think that some time in the future I will have an audience understand me well enough — and I hope it comes through Storyteller, because I’m getting closer and closer to the real me all the time — that there will be an audience, and it probably will be just a small bunch, it won’t be everybody who likes the fun and laughter of “Freebooters,” who will accept the other side and gratefully look at it. They may not like it, and I’m not asking them to. I just don’t think I have the audience for it.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Everybody is in danger of being misunderstood in this culture. I’d be very much in the same position as Mike Diana if I wasn’t so self-restricting, if I wasn’t born to the hypocritical, practically Victorian "ideals" that were foisted on me as a child: can I throw out another music/comics synonym? John Lennon spent half a dozen years trying to re-write the love ballads from the '50s and early '60s, y’know ... the pathetic Roy Orbison or Tin Pan Alley teen tunes thing and although he degraded his later Beatles stuff that was really inspired he claimed, and I agree with him, that he only really came alive when he produced the works that many people, Beatles fans and the like, just can’t understand, get behind or grok; stuff like Two Virgins (with Yoko Ono) and, really his best work ever was John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band: that was the real John Lennon with warts and all. He was only allowed to be really himself and, by that grace, learn to live and be in love and to be a parent and all that because the world had previously paid homage to him as a Beatle, be it mop-top or, as I say, his latter work before the Beatles split. For some court judgment to effectively pronounce that a young artist is not allowed by law to investigate himself and the world around him, is not allowed to create or re-create the god-awful modern world he was born into is the most disgraceful crime committed upon a free man in America. Mike Diana should not be facing jail or whatever the hell it is those malicious appointed bastards have threatened him with. Diana should be vindicated by everybody, every soul who suffers in this -up society but who hasn’t got Diana’s talent for expression. The judge should be sent to jail for being a posturing blind-eyed pissant posing as a man of integrity! This planet is losing itself, I tell ya!

BACK ON THE ROAD

GROTH: This might be a good place for me to ask you what think of Crumb, because the classic example that comes to mind in this context of course, is Crumb’s sketchbook which are as unmediated an artistic expression as I can think of.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I’m not as culturally involved with Crumb as a lot of people are of my age, or maybe a little bit older than me. I wasn’t in the States when Crumb was doing his initial work, Zap, and all that sort of thing. Because I was a creature from the commercial comics, I viewed with suspicion the underground material. I was a wholly different person back in those days. I was pretty uptight. And a friend of mine brought back some black and white Zaps and stuff like that from the States, and he was thrilled to pieces by them. I couldn’t comprehend it. Because I was so caught up in what I was doing, my intention to be second only to Jack Kirby or some immature goal like that. I certainly understand Crumb nowadays and have for a long time. But at that time, I couldn’t comprehend the need to expose your every thought. I thought that things had to be controlled. Now obviously I still have quite a lot of that about me. But it’s with a knowledge, and it’s with an understanding of what I’m doing rather than just following some archetype. Today, I adore Crumb. He is a fantastically important artist. He is still working with energy. You know I’ve never seen that bloody film yet?

GROTH: Oh really. You should see it. [Laughs.] It’s amazing.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, I know. We here at the studio kept trying to make a date to go see it because it was around here at one of the art theaters, but something would always come up to kill the plan.

In a nutshell, I don’t know if I appreciate Crumb as much as people who are more his contemporary and more his type of creator. But I certainly think I give him tons of respect.

GROTH: You recently made a distinction to me in casual conversation between yourself and what you referred to as the kinds of cartoonists I publish.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes.

GROTH: And I sort of understood what you meant, but on the other hand, you are expressing yourself, and you re moving closer to Crumb territory in the sense that I think you’re expressing the themes and ideas that are most important to your life.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh, sure.

GROTH: But I was wondering if you could elaborate on what you meant by making that distinction between yourself—

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, I noticed that you noticed this at the time. I don’t think I’m being particularly kind to myself when I say that I’m a commercial artist but after all, I am the bloke who created Weapon X, I did do Avengers #100 for crying out loud. [Groth laughs.] And if that isn’t bleedin’ commercial, I don’t know what is! But it was a mindlessness on my part. Even though I always put my little personal things into that kind of material — although with the Avengers there was nothing personal about that for me. But it was a young journeyman thing, so it was done with vigor. But it has no validity to me or my life or my career. Even though I said that, and I do mean it, it’s less true today than it has been in the past. Yes, I am moving toward something more personally sophisticated. I’m not there yet. With each book of Storyteller — and it’s not as if I’m doing this deliberately either— I’m trying to forge ahead in some sort of way of explaining myself to myself. It’s a theme that has come up many times between you and me as we talk: Which is, as you get older, you get wiser. As you get older, you need more substance to whatever it may be, whether it’s creative, whether it’s your marriage; it’s any number of goddamn things. The kind of people you enjoy talking to today are wholly different types than the people you enjoyed talking to 15 years ago.

GROTH: So true.

WINDSOR-SMITH: We all hopefully change and get better. Some of us don’t, but what can you do? I am less commercial — , this bloody word, “commercial,” it really doesn’t hang right, because I can’t say I’m less commercial today than I was before; it isn’t like that. I’m hoping I’m more commercial today.

GROTH: Yeah, but you’re more personal today, truer to your priorities.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes, right. I’ve always had this coterie of fans, sort of like John Byrne’s. Everybody says: “It doesn’t matter what Byrne does, he’ll always sell books, because he has a coterie of fans who buy everything he does.” Here’s me scratching my head... and it turns out I’ve got a coterie of fans, too. So I always manage to sell enough to scrape by. I’ve never actually gone to the dumper. But what is it that makes the John Byrne fan a John Byrne fan? What is it that makes the BWS fan appreciate of my work? I’ve always felt that it has something to do with the personality of my work. It can’t be because I draw better than everybody else, because I don’t. It can’t be that I create more colorful villains than everybody else, because I don’t. So what is it that makes people like my work? Well, I’ve come to one conclusion, as misguided as it maybe, that there is something about my work that is far more personal, far more me, than Joe Blow. So in the Storyteller material, it is just taking all that stuff that has always been these loose little bits all over my career, like confetti, and putting them all together into one colorful bowl. I am no longer cautious about showing my real self to the public and if the real me is not commercial — in other words, if it goes in the dumper, and my esteemed publisher can no longer finance me... [sighs] Then I will have hit the nadir of my career by being non-commercial. And I’ll know it for sure.

But going back to an extreme, which is Mike Diana: Whereas Mike Diana does this material because he has to, because of his struggling form of expression for him ... And he’s not sitting there drawing dead angels saying, “I’m going to make a million! Wow! I’m going to get a BMW 35i out of this!” It doesn’t cross his mind, probably! Mind you it probably didn’t cross his bleedin’mind that they would try to throw him in jail for it either, you know?

GROTH: Right, but he’s an extreme case. But the word “commercial” is very slippery.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes, it is.

GROTH: I don t know if you’re familiar with his work but we publish Dan Clowes, who does a book called Eightball. I think he’s one of the best cartoonists working today.

WINDSOR-SMITH: You know, I’ve always wanted to ask you: Can you send me some of this stuff? Because I never get to see any of this gear. I read about it all the time — only in your magazine because the CBG doesn’t give a , of course — and I see his spot illustrations and I think, “Well that looks interesting...” This thing called Jim.

GROTH: Oh my God, yes.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I mean, just the cover. I saw one of his covers, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a gas!”

GROTH: Jim’s a genius.

WINDSOR-SMITH: And I thought, I have got to go find this ! I mean, I’m in Kingston, New York — it’s not like if I was in Manhattan, where I could probably find the stuff.

GROTH: I think you’d like it. Dan’s great, and Jim Woodring is just brilliant. But we sell 25,000 copies of Dan’s Eightball, and you’re talking about your publisher being very happy to sell 50,000 of yours. So the point I’m making is there’s not really ... You can’t say he’s not commercial and you are commercial because the gap just isn’t that enormous.

WINDSOR-SMITH: No, I suppose it isn’t. But it’s as you just said: the word “commercial” really isn’t the right word. And certainly if we’re talking about the intent and the integrity, they go together. I use that word “commercial” off the top of my head, but I’ll think of another one [laughs].

GROTH: Yeah. The one difference between you and, say, the Hernandez Brothers is that you bring to your work a lot more mainstream comics baggage.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Right. That’s where I once was.

GROTH: Yeah. And if I may say so, it seems to me that you — l can’t think of anyone else off the top of my head — but you’re doing the most mature creative work of any one who has that baggage. I mean, you’re really using it, you’re using the conventions of Sword and Sorcery, Science Fiction, and Mythology or Fantasy. And you’re also undermining those conventions through humor.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Right. Thanks. And it doesn’t even seem like it was intentional. It just seems like a natural... I think you said the same thing as Diana [Schutz] said, that she had this tinge of disappointment when she realized that Storyteller was a genre book, and one of the genres was Sword and Sorcery. It was like, “Oh God, Barry’s re-hashing something from years ago, trying to be 21 again.” And I could understand that she would have imagined that. And I think your story was exactly the same as Diana’s because she glazed across it and didn’t say, “Oh blimey, the guy’s fat!” Or whatever. [Groth laughs.] And her disappointment just went right out the window when she started reading it and realized it’s a different thing entirely, not a recreation nor a spoof; I would hate to think I was spoofing myself — it’s like being a 1950s crooner and going back on the road.

GROTH: [Laughs.] No, it’s more like Sword and Sorcery meets The Philadelphia Story.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Ooh, ooh, yeah... There you go. So it’s a natural progression, and I hope it’s a healthy one.

GROTH: Well it certainly seems like it.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well I’m really glad you liked it, I really am.

GROTH: [Laughs.] I’m glad we did this interview because otherwise I might have glossed over it, precisely because I probably would have been turned off by the superficial genre conventions. When I got the package, I looked at it, and it was Sword and Sorcery, and I really thought — and I can tell you this now because it’s no longer true — but I really thought, “Oh , I’ve got to read this stuff, and it’s going to be Barry doing his Sword and Sorcery shtick, and I’m going to have to dance around it in the interview. “And then of course when I read it I was happily disabused.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes! I’m so thrilled. God, you must have been ting bricks thinking, “Oh my God, how am I going to get around this?”

GROTH: [laughs] Right, exactly!

WINDSOR-SMITH: “How many euphemisms can I use before Barry twigs that I hate his new book?”

I’m happy you were happily surprised. It actually means a great deal to me. You are one of the more critical people ... Well frankly there isn’t much in a field...

GROTH: [Laughs.] In a field with no critical aptitude I’m King.

WINDSOR-SMITH: In a field where you’re one of the smarter people, by all means … Oh gosh, we’re just going to start hugging each other now Gary!

GROTH: That’s right — what a great place to end the interview.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Indeed, thanks.