And since 2009, I’ve been steadily making prints and drawings and exhibiting them in local galleries in San Francisco. Ever since college, German Expressionism and early twentieth-century graphic art in general have been a huge influence. PM: Meanwhile, I was becoming increasingly wrapped up in printmaking: woodcut, linocut, lithograph, and etching. LJ: So that’s why your comics are so pretentious and backward looking! It was really a choice born of intellectual gluttony more than anything. I studied Modern European Intellectual history so that I could sprawl across disciplines and study literature, art, philosophy, and history all at once. I got to read a lot of good books and soak my brain in the past, which has been fantastic for collecting raw material for stories and images. A history PhD was a circuitous route to making art, I suppose, but I’m glad I did it. But I did so by going to graduate school in history-that is, after first spending two years doodling on beer coasters in Prague as an English teacher, followed by more doodling on post-it notes at various office jobs around San Francisco. PM: After college, I got serious about making art, though I forgot about comics for a while. LJ: So then what? How did you go from being a fresh-faced college graduate with a wishy-washy interest in art and no real commitment to comics to a thirty-something-year-old man-child talking people’s ear off about his “artistic process”? LJ: Isn’t it true the only reason you kept drawing after college was to evade the crippling anxiety of being a normal talentless dullard? No one wants to hear about the crap you made when you were a kid or, even worse, an attention-hungry brat in college. LJ: Ok, pal, let’s not get too bogged down in the early years. My most recurring strip was called “Fatty McJerkface,” featuring the random and excessively violent exploits of a loathsome bully with a vulnerable core. These comics were crude in both form and content. I took a couple art classes and drew the comics page of Wesleyan’s student paper with two friends for a little over a year before we got the sack. Thankfully, I got back into it in college. But I clammed up sometime in middle school and my drawing went pretty much dormant through high school. Instead, I always wanted to be a cartoonist-writer-artist-comedic actor-filmmaker-gentleman farmer, and I didn’t really see a problem with that when I was 11 (I still have trouble seeing why that’s a problem). At some point in my childhood I wanted to be a cartoonist, but it never felt like a singular burning desire. I’ve always enjoyed drawing since I was a kid and have been a compulsive doodler for as long as I can recall. PM: I only recently-as in, within the last year- started drawing comics with any regularity or seriousness of purpose. LJ: I’ll ask again: how did you come to cartooning? What say you just answer my questions truthfully and to the point? LJ: Alright, alright, could you stop wasting everyone’s time? Write your phony novel on your own time, bub. In those empty hours after a catch, after the decks had been swabbed, the baleen stacked, and the blubber casked, I would nestle down in my coil of ropes with a rusty knife nicked from the galley and scratch the content of my mind’s eye into the ivory tooth of whale. But, as I realized years later, after I had been thoroughly brined with ocean water, caked with spermaceti, and perfumed with ambergris, my schooling in cartooning had also just commenced. I awoke hours later aboard a packet on the Pacific with the business end of harpoon poking at my boot heel. At the tender age of eleven, while visiting San Francisco for the National Youth Spelling Bee, I was shanghaied by a buxom chaperone with a chloroform-laced kerchief. PM: I came to cartooning after a boyhood at sea. Loutish Journalist : How did you come to cartooning in the first place? ~Peter Mann, author and longtime sufferer of The Quixote Syndrome May my rectitude serve as an example to the denizens of this World Wide Web. I present them to you, reader, not because I presume that you wish to know the sordid details of my life or the gruesome mechanics behind the gleaming façade of a finished comic, but because I would like to show you how admirably I acquitted myself in the face of this man’s boorish interrogation. The following excerpt is from an interview with an ill-mannered journalist who invited me to coffee on the pretense of asking me a few questions about my comics.
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