John Campbell Interview

John Campbell draws comics, including the web comic Pictures For Sad Children and hourly comics he’s drawn each January for five years. John Campbell answered my questions (I’m Dan Copulsky) in April 2010. John Campbell is a swell guy.

Your hourly comics originally seemed to be a response to daily journal comics, an attempt to create something that more fully, as you put it the first morning you tested the idea, “captures the rhythm of everyday life.” Was the experiment a success?

I think “yes and no” would be the most reasonable response. The 2-panel format my hourly comics settled into can approximate some sense of time and place, in some ways more than the standard daily journal comic. In exchange I lose a lot of the contemplative nature of journal comics I think. I get stuck trying to make a little 2-panel comic “interesting” or “funny” and lose a lot of the sense of what it feels like to actually be alive. These fall flat in a particularly distressing way when they don’t work, because if they are not “entertaining” and they also do not really capture some element of living then it becomes obvious that they are just another goddamn waste of time on the internet.

Doing hourly comics affects my life and my comics about my life, which makes it not a real objective account of living, of course. I try not to project a version of myself onto the comics but it happens, of course of course. I have friends who read my hourlies and my friends have friends who read them, so I have to filter what I choose to make a comic out of and what I don’t. If some private drama goes on throughout a day a daily journal comic could concentrate on something else for a moment but my hourlies have to be about something else for hours and hours and that gets stupid.

Your motivations must have changed over the years, but you’ve kept doing hourly comics each January. Why did you do it this year?

I began this year’s purely out of obligation. In previous years I’ve been waiting to do them. It feels good to take on a big project and get it done. But I was busy in December shipping my first book and I did not really have the time to start pining for some big task. I think my most consistent motivation has been knowing that I will appreciate having the hourly comics around later, so I can get some sense of where my life has been and where I am going. In the short-term I feel an obligation to make them for other people and in the long-term I use them as a substitute for my terrible memory.

Sometimes I tell myself that if I want to be a writer, I’ve got to make myself write. But lots of times there’s just nothing I particularly want to write, so sometimes I tell myself that it’s okay to not bother writing, that it’s actually better not to write just to write, that I should wait until I actually have something I want to write. It might not be the same for you, but it does sounds like creating comics can be a struggle for you, so why do you bother?

It is different every time I make a comic. Sometimes I have a story I want to tell and I mash my hands into the paper screaming trying to get it out and even if it works it can turn out to be a “bad” story to begin with that does not resonate with myself or anyone else. Sometimes I think that it is about time to make a comic and I make whatever I can until something, anything at all, comes out of me that has some redeemable aspect to it. So the answer to “should i force myself to write” is “sometimes” and as a side note it is a miracle that anything of any value has ever come out of this unfocused and angry “artistic process.”

Do you draw the best you can? Do you push yourself to become a better artist? Do you feel at all limited in doing those things by expectations of an audience to continue seeing work in the somewhat stick-figurey style they know as yours?

I’ve recently felt “stagnant” artistically, maybe “bored with my aesthetic” but it is hard to say for sure. I just know that I feel like I have made more mediocre than good comics recently. The relationship between art and writing in comics is tangled and I think when the art gets boring the writing gets boring and vice versa. It is not like one in particular is to blame. I’ve tried a few different things, played with crayons, made a collage comic inspired by Souther Salazar. I’m not sure where it’s going but I hope that a few decent comics come out of it. I feel zero obligation to my current style but it came from honing my very few artistic abilities and it is the natural way now that I attempt to convey a story so I doubt it will go by the wayside any time soon. If it does though I am not afraid of audience expectations. The mysterious forces that have made some of my comics appeal to other people will probably not stop if the shape of my characters change a little or I start using colors.

Despite your work generally using fairly simplistic illustrations, there is a visual element distinct to comics, panel layout, that you sometimes make sophisticated use of. Is that something you’re consciously aware of?

I try to convey a story in the best possible way and that can mean making the layout plain and unnoticeable or that can mean making some element stand out. Sometimes I don’t want to think about it very much and the layout does not relate to the content in any way not as a conscious decision but as some kind of “default” which is probably part of what leads to boring comics. Like any reader of comics I see something like Chris Ware’s complex layouts and feel both awe and annoyance. But I want to “learn from it.” Sometimes I feel like I am mining “alternative” comics and culture for ideas and presenting watered-down and inconsequential versions of interesting concepts for people with low attention spans bored at work.

Pictures For Sad Children – picturesforsadchildren.com
John’s Livejournal – stereotypist.livejournal.com
John’s Hourly Comics – hourlycomic.com