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| "Game Expense" |
As I write this preface, I'm currently in a hotel in Albany. I'd missed my train back home and am bunking up in a somewhat decent room for the night. I saw a cockroach on the shower wall. This is screaming New York.
Nonetheless, my reasons for being on the east coast are very personal: I had went to the exhibition of Gary Hallgren, a particular favorite illustrator of mine who I'd been in touch with for a while. The show was held at the Art For The Soul gallery in downtown Springfield, MA, birthplace of basketball, which has a flavor all its own. By that, I mean I bought a small calzone at Paramount Pizza that turned out to be the size of my head. I'm finishing it up now.
He was a genuine class act; usually people tell you not to meet your heroes, but he was an awesome subversion to such advice. I did want to chat with him about his work and career, but I was on such a time crunch that I almost made the train. I do want to thank Mr. Myers, the curator of the show, for getting me to Pittsfield during this hellish storm. No thanks to the fuckheads not plowing the streets, my Greyhound was delayed by 21 minutes. Awesome
At least the room is pretty quiet, not liking the deposit policy though. It's a huge toss-up on whether they'll give it back or not. Sometimes they'll say that you took a toiletry as cause for them not giving it back. It's weird that way.
Before I get into the main event, I want to mention a few brief anecdotes that weren't picked up by the mics when we began. I asked Hallgren if he still has the original illustrations for the covers for one of my all-time favorite works of his, Mort the Dead Teenager, to which he said he doesn't; according to him, the originals were sold in a set at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo a while back, to which I jokingly said something to the effect of "it should have been me!" I had also gifted some hand-pressed buttons, one of a piece I did of Mort a few years back, and another of an illustration I have not shared and probably won't, Hallgren describing the latter as "leaving nothing to the imagination".
Without further ado, here's the transcript from my talk with Mr. Hallgren. I'd love to see him again in person, but I owed him a pretty big debt and this was one of my biggest chances to not pass up.
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Hallgren: I'm fully unprepared to do this.
Ai: (laughs) Oh, it's alright. It's alright. I haven't done many interviews in my life, but I think this would be pretty worthwhile. How are you, Mr. Hallgren?
H: As they say in the swamps, fine as frog hair.
A: Anything else happening besides your daughter's birthday? (Her birthday was the day before, happy belated birthday, Annabel!)
H: Well, I'm starting to write some more comics stories again...I've been, over the last 20-25 years, when the news strikes me, I'll write silly and naughty comics stories. And I finally got enough so that I could publish a book of them (Amuzing Stories #1). And that came out four years ago. And I'm starting to do it again.
A: That's awesome.
H: I was busy with some of the "finer" art, but it goes in waves. I'll be letting that go for a while, working on comics stories.
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| "TV Dinner" |
A: Awesome, awesome. Working on anything besides Hägar and that?
H: Yeah, sure...the current story that I'm working on, in the middle of penciling, is called...I can't remember the name of my own story! It has to be with...hmm, what does it have to do with? I keep sidetracking myself because I'm also writing a story about time travel, and the puzzlements of trying to change the past and how it really can't be done, but trying to make light of that is funny. That wasn't a joke.
A: It almost sounded like--you know, "the past is the past".
H: Yeah.
A: It's a harsh reality.
H: But we have all these thoughts about, "Gee, if I had only done something differently at this certain nexus," well, maybe you'd disappear, if you had.
A: Like grandfather theory, right?
H: Yeah.
A: So, Mickey Mouse is public domain, what's your opinion on that?
H: The original "pie-eyed" Mickey Mouse from Steamboat Willie is public domain.
A: There's some more stuff. I feel like a lot of Mickey went public domain this year.
H: Well, the later model Mickey with the white eyeballs, he's still quite copyrighted. I had a request a couple of years ago from some publishers in Germany...they were doing a parody of famous folk tales and they asked me to contribute. So I said, "Well, I'd like to do Steamboat Willie." And they said, "That sounds great!" And then they got right back to me and said in Germany he's still protected.
A: Yes, it's different all over the place.
H: I had to do something else.
A: In Japan, a lot of the early Disney stuff is public domain. I was in Japan two years ago and I saw one of those "public domain" DVDs of Pinocchio on a shelf at a BOOK-OFF. And I was like, "Oh, I should probably get this!" (laughs) Because it was such a weird little novelty, like "Oh yeah, it's public domain over here." I think it's Creator Plus 70 or Creator Plus 60...something. No, it's Creator Plus 50, Life Plus 50...because Jim Croce's work is public domain in Japan.＊
H: But wait a minute, Life Plus 50, he didn't die 50 years ago!
A: He died 50 years ago.
H: He did? It was that long ago?
A: Yeah, he died in, I think, '73.
H: (grabs his face) Oh, all the time is slipping away!
A: (laughs) It's alright, it's alright.
H: I guess you're right.
A: Yeah, no, what a great talent Croce was.
H: Yeah, I mean, there's, you know, the golden oldies [stations] still play him regularly.
A: I saw ELO a couple of months ago with Jeff Lynne down in Detroit.
H: He's still working?
A: Oh no, it was his farewell tour.
H: Oh, well, I envy you for that.
A: I grew up listening to ELO. "Evil Woman" is one of my all-time favorites.
H: I watch him on YouTube. (laughs)
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| "Air Pirates Funnies #3" |
A: What's it like to have an exhibition up in here?
H: Oh, well, it's gratifying. It's terrifying. I'm happy it happened, and I've had a lot of excellent response, so there is that.
A: Awesome.
H: And I have to thank Bill [Myers] for doing it, because he tried to get me a show here about five years ago, and it didn't work out, but he didn't give up.
A: Nancy. Let's talk Nancy. Any favorites?
H: Oh, Nancy. Nancy, Nancy, Nancy...when I was a youngish underground cartoonist, there were a couple of guys in the group that thought Nancy was the bee's knees, and I never got it. I didn't get what they were up to.
A: It's hard to get, I guess, at the time. Not really anything special.
H: They took the ironical, sort of the absurd view of it, and I was still too literal. (laughs) I mean, at the same time, I couldn't play saxophone with Dan O'Neill because he was an Irish troubadour, and he counted however he damn pleased. He'd stop the banjo, and he'd go off on a tangent, and I said, "Dan, you've got to stick with the 12 bars if we're going to play blues together!" He couldn't do it.
A: No, I get it.
H: And it's sort of like the way I was with Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman, but I eventually figured out what it was all about. It's a tabula rasa. It's the most reduced comic that has ever been produced, and it's like a big swimming pool full of blue water that's inviting you in.
A: Have you read How to Read Nancy?
H: Oh, sure!
A: Oh, I love it.
H: Yeah, it's a great book.
A: It definitely explains comics a lot better than other books about comics can.
H: Yes, it is the best text on comics I've ever read, and I'm happy to say that I have met and have had conversations with both the authors. I talked to them last May in Columbus, Ohio at the Nancy show.
A: I should have been there, I really should have been there!
H: Oh, it's a great show. I mean, I just got the art back that they borrowed from me, which, that was nice because that gave me a little VIP status there.
A: That's awesome, man. I mean, you definitely got your Nancy down.
H: Well, I may have come to Nancy later in life, but when I go someplace, I like to take plenty of baggage.
A: So, you tried out for Nancy in the 90s, and you did not get it. I do love your work on it though. Did you ever meet the Gilchrists who ended up getting it?
H: No, and I don't want to.
A: (laughs) So I take it you don't like their work?
H: Nope.
A: Oh, I don't [either].
H: In a word, no. (laughs)
A: I don't really care for them either, no. I ended up meeting Guy I believe twice at a convention, and, I mean, I'm pretty sour on him. If anything, there should not be cartoonists being guests on The 700 Club.
H: What's that?
A: It's a cable program that CBN had a long time ago, and the guy who ran the show, Pat Robertson, died a while back. He was evil, like a genuinely evil guy.
H: Pat Robertson...
A: Yes, he was the host of the show, and his son does it now, but Guy Gilchrist came, and he drew Nancy, and she was saying, like, "Thanks 700 Club!" It was pretty bad. (laughs)
H: Well, I'm not sure why, the excuse they gave to me when they said they'd made their choice was that they were going with a team, because they thought that I would not be able to keep up with the deadline, they gave me six weeks to do six weeks worth [of strips], and I made it by the skin of my teeth because I was busy. I did it when I could. I still made the deadline, they said "No, we're worried about you making your deadline."
A: Yeah, I mean, a lot of the early Gilchrist stuff was traced-over Bushmiller. They literally traced over it.
H: Well, you know, I don't fault them for that...because when I'm doing somebody else's art, I do whatever I can to get the feeling, and that sometimes includes doing tracing. Not what I turn in, but as an exercise.
A: Right, but they just went over older strips and maybe changed the dialogue a little. It was the same joke, same sort of thing. It wasn't anything new, and Jerry Scott had a similar issue when he did Nancy, but it came into his own thing, and I appreciate it. It's not really Nancy, but I appreciate it.
H: Oh, yeah, he bent it and shaped it alright, and as did the Gilchrists, but I didn't like the direction he was going [in]. I thought, "you know..." and now we've got Nancy being reshaped yet again.
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| "Danger Nancy" |
A: I was going to get to that, how do you like Olivia Jaimes' Nancy?
H: Well, for starters, I wish she used a little bit heavier line.
A: She has a background in web comics...
H: It doesn't print well in our newspaper.
A: That's an issue, yeah.
H: I think that's a serious issue. You know, whatever medium you're in, make it work for you. Don't push the limits when they don't need to be pushed.
A: That's true. From what I've heard before that, Nancy was only in about 50 or 60 papers around the country, and then when [Jaimes] got on and people were talking about it, it went back up to 300 or so.
H: There was a virtual presentation from Olivia at Nancy Fest, and it was a very sort of coy and [she] said "I don't like to be in public, and I'm going to turn my strip over to somebody else for a month or two."
A: It was kind of a bit, I guess. The stuff that was done by the other artists who did a week or so of strips, I thought that was a pretty fun little thing to do.
H: I think that's okay, I certainly appreciate the change-up every once in a while. I remember when Bobby London introduced Dirty Duck as a basement strip under Odd Bodkin, and that was pretty phenomenal at the time, and now I don't understand Bobby. He hates Dan, and Dan gave him a start, you know?
A: Dan was pretty much the front of the MLF and everything.
H: Oh, totally.
A: He was the big dude that the suit was after.
H: I think Bobby probably thinks I've been Dan's toady forever, which, if he has to claim he's not Dan's toady by being such a "bad boy" and having his butt kicked off Popeye, and bad-mouthing Dan for dragging him into the Air Pirates, which he now repudiates. So, he's a complicated guy.
A: I mean, you guys changed history. That suit pretty much re-identified parody law.
H: Well, it's still up in the air. I mean, it didn't really fix anything, it just kicked the can down the road in a way.
A: It did some things. It made people aware about the state of parody in the country at the time.
H: It's generated some print, The Pirates and the Mouse, the book about the Air Pirates by Bob Levin. Bob Levin has also written biographies of Dwaine B. Tinsley, the infamous cartoon editor at Hustler Magazine, who was dragged into court by a complaint from his daughter about unfortunate sexual hijinks, which was never proven, but it ruined Tinsley, of course. He created this very, very un-PC strip called Chester the Molester. Have you seen that one?
A: I've heard of it, I don't believe I've seen it.
H: They took him into court and said "Here's Chester the Molester himself!" But Levin researched it, said it's not subtle. His daughter had some axe to grind and saw an easy way to do it.
A: K-Otics. Any favorite songs? Performances?
H: I think working with CBGB in the early 90s was great. What a legendary venue. We played for a couple of Neal Adams Christmas parties, that was fun. And Marvel Comics Christmas parties in their office, we'd set up in the Bullpen and flail away.
A: Speaking of Marvel, Teen Hulk. Remember Teen Hulk?
H: Sort of.
A: Any stories about that?
H: (shrugs) Not a one. Larry [Hama] is my conduit into Marvel, and it stops there.
A: Have you talked with him recently?
H: He just posted a picture of our daughter when she was two on Facebook.
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| "Do It Yourself" |
A: Cool, I got five minutes' time. I'm gonna try to speedrun some of this.
H: It's alright.
A: Mort stuff. Who was your favorite character to draw?
H: Ooh...Mort.
A: You liked to draw Mort?
H: I liked to draw Mort, yeah.
A: He's just a mess. I love him.
H: He's like Archie. A more real Archie to me.
A: I did see a lot of Archie-isms in it, with Kimberly and Maureen being a sort of analog to Betty and Veronica.
H: Yes, yeah. And his goofy friend who had the haircut...
A: Slick or Weirdo?
H: Weirdo.
A: Weirdo, yes...
H: I was very much sorta making that up as I went along. Larry wrote a...you know this, he's a good script writer. He's excellent. There weren't a lot of horrible questions that I couldn't answer, but he gave me pretty much carte blanche to do it like I saw it.
A: So it was more of a collaboration between you and Hama?
H: He wrote the script, and Marvel published it, and they didn't know what to do with it, and it disappeared.
A: I enjoy it very much.
H: Great, I'm glad!
A: How personal was the comic to you? How personal was Mort?
H: Not very. Truthfully, there wasn't a lot. I guess if I think on it for a moment, anybody that does a strip about a teenager must reach back into their own teenagerhood and feel a few things and bring them out. I can't say what that is without, you know, wasting your time, but I'm sure there's got to be a few things. And of course, Mort's dad and the car that Mort died in, Studebakers are another one of my passions. You know that. (laughs)
A: I could tell! Did you have any interesting stories that went on?
H: During Mort?
A: Yes.
H: I got an interesting story from the first time I went up to the National Lampoon, and at the request of Doug Kenny, we were talking about what I could do for the Lampoon. He wanted to know if I worked with writers. I said, "But I also have ideas of my own!" And I pitched them a strip idea...which was a simple four-panel strip called Four for a Quarter, inside of an old-fashioned black-and-white photo booth. It's just four panels of somebody goofing off in the photo booth. He said, "Yeah, I like it. That could work. Do [me] up a few." And at that time, Matty Simmons, the publisher, walked in and says, "What do we need him for? Let's just go down to the photo booth in Grand Central and do it." It made Doug mad. "Matty, leave, please, you're not going to steal this guy's idea right out from under our noses!" So that introduced me to the cutthroat world of magazine humor publishing.
A: Yeah, it's awful.
H: It's gone now. (laughs)
A: How do you think Mort's aged?
H: Pretty good, I think so, I think so. I still read mysteries and books that don't have cell phones.
A: It's fun. Movies, TV, anything? There was apparently a TV show from what I've heard that was optioned at UPN back when that was a thing.
H: Ooh, missed that.
A: Apparently Wizard Magazine picked up on it. I don't know.
H: From Mort?
A: From someone, I dunno. (laughs)
H: Larry should know, I'll have to ask him.
A: This is a very silly question. Should Mort get a happy ending or should he languish in a hellish cycle of his own creation?
H: (laughs) Well, if you want more books, he should languish in the hellish cycle.
A: I don't know right now, not a lot of people are interested in it.
H: No, it's kind of moot since I don't think anything's going to happen. Although, you never know. It's one of the few properties that Marvel has never sold the movie, so it could still happen.
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| "Working Mother" |
A: At one point it might have been, but I don't know. [Disney's] probably getting it back this year. Who knows? They're getting the Fox stuff back, and the Universal Hulk stuff. Tom and Mary Bierbaum apparently made a comic called Dead Kid Adventures sometime in 1994. Know about it?
H: Tom and Mary Bierbaum...any relation to Bob Bierenbaum?
A: No, (laughs) they worked on, I think The New Mutants or whichever one it was. ＊＊
H: I don't remember. I'm very, very ignorant of modern comics, sorry to say.
A: It's alright.
H: Can't help you there.
A: Mad Magazine, any favorites?
H: Ooh, the killing of the Pokémon. ("Hokéycon" from #386)
A: I see!
H: I murdered Pikachu with a stick of TNT.
A: I don't think Pikachu can learn Explosion! (laughs)
H: They wanted him blown up. I was all too happy to blow him up! I have nothing against [Pikachu] personally, but it's just too good of an assignment to say no. (laughs)
A: Okay, one last question and that'll be it. SpongeBob, your work on SpongeBob.
H: Just the SpongeBob magazine.
A: You a fan of SpongeBob at all?
H: I am now.
A: Any favorite episodes?
H: Not that come to mind, but I did try writing for SpongeBob and they said, "We don't have sharks in SpongeBob."
A: There are shark characters.
H: There are now, but when I put in my script, they said "Sorry, no sharks." (laughs)
A: Thank you for your time, I owe you a tremendous debt.
H: No problem.
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＊Editorial note 3/8/25: in 2018, Japan extended their copyright terms from Life Plus 50 to Life Plus 70, syncing up with most other terms in Europe, therefore leaving Croce's work under copyright, except in countries with Life Plus 50 terms such as New Zealand. "Pinocchio" is public domain in Japan due to a separate ruling regarding films made prior to 1953, regardless of country of origin. Due to the 2018 extension, a 20-year grace period is in place for any works under copyright that were set to expire in 2019, alongside a separate extension for additional "authors" of films alongside the director (who has their own Life Plus 70 in place). Anything in the domain prior to 2019 remains there. Another term is in place for certain films released prior to 1970 with an additional 38 years added, but I'm not sure about the logistics of how that term works.
Additionally, since the publication of this piece, I have donated $100 to the Art for the Soul gallery for their efforts to raise awareness for underrepresented artists of different backgrounds and cultures, and to continue their mission as an integral part of the Springfield community. You can donate here, anything given is tax-deductible and going to a good nonprofit cause.
＊＊ Editorial note 3/9/25: The Bierbaums did not write "New Mutants", instead they are most well-known for "Legion of Superheroes". "Dead Kid" had an ashcan not too long after "Mort" finished up, and a series debut around 1997, which was shortly cancelled after two issues. I recommend you do some digging into it, it's a very interesting book with a lot of promise.
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