By MICHEL FIFFE for The Beat

[Editor's note: We're proud to continue running Michel Fiffe's series of interviews with some of the more fascinating comics artists of the last few decades. This time out: Mark Badger -- one of the most progressive comics artists who ever worked in mainstream comics.]

I’ll admit that it took me a while to appreciate Mark Badger’s work. Something about his style didn’t seem quite right, and yet it stayed with me. I found myself going back to it as if though I wanted to make sure that I didn’t like it. It’s a typical reaction to things that leave some sort of lasting impression on us, positive or negative, whether we want them to or not. My staggered appreciation of Mark Badger’s work grew to a full blown interest and personal influence.

I was interested in how his bold approach to cartooning functioned and what it represented throughout the comic book world. Whether Badger’s unmistakable stamp is calculated design or blithe reveling, it is above all drawn like he’s “from another fucking planet”, as Howard Chaykin aptly put it. Kirby, abstract narrative, breaking into Marvel, gallery art, comics iconography, corporate manipulation, Jerry Rice’s calf muscle, and a slew of other things you can’t go on not knowing about are discussed in this first portion of my interview with Mark Badger.

Michel Fiffe: I want to talk about some of your recent work. How did your contribution to the “Abstract Comics” book come about?

Mark Badger: It came out of nowhere. It was absolutely stunning. I had posted a couple of pages I had done of a Mike Zeck’s Master of Kung Fu in art school, probably ‘77-‘78, on my blog and I get this e-mail from this guy, Andrei Molotiu, who wanted to do a book about abstract comics for Fantagraphics and asked if I would be a part of it. He said, “You were ahead of the movement. You were doing it for a while before anybody else was!” It’s really funny because the way comics work for him is the way they work for me. Usually when people talk about Jack Kirby, the writers will talk about all of his great ideas, but artists are say, “Yeah, yeah, but he drew those really neat things. What’s with this idea stuff?” With Andrei, we started talking about the flow of how a comic panel moves and he was really interested in that as sort of the gestural drawing in the composition, all of these little images that were stuck in a grid to make a bigger image that make up this sequence. Most comics have punch line or a narrative, but in abstraction you find the interesting compositional stuff and structural elements that make the stuff happen. That’s what I like about comics! I never met anybody who liked that about comics. Everybody thought it was weird that I liked that about comics. To me, there’s this opening sequence in the Eternals where a plane gets fished out of the water by this energy block or something, and it’s like 10 panels and it’s a totally an effective emotional thing. It’s just a sequence and 99% of it is Kirby crackle, Kirby water, no figures, the plane is like a sausage with wings stuck on it. [Fiffe laughs.] It’s just a powerful sequence of shapes and colors put together. Does it need to be in the Eternals to be expressive and make you feel something? It’s so close to abstraction that what it feels like to me was Jack trying to express some kind of movement and power, beyond just the costume, the ideas or the wacky machinery. There’s something that is the essence of Jack when he does stories that transcends his plots, dialogue, and what he is drawing. You can really feel it when other people draw his characters, they can “draw” more representational than Jack but they can’t get that essence. Except Walter Simonson. He does something similar.

F: Wait, so you never talked about this kind of stuff with your peers back in the day?

B: Are you kidding?

F: Well, maybe not with Kyle Baker, but nobody at all?

B: Kyle would talk more about cartoon craft. He sucked up everything that way. Robbie Busch and I have talked about it a little bit. Robbie and I have sort of a bet about abstract comics versus narrative comics. Nah, you don’t talk about this stuff. This is like talking about Henri Matisse or something. That’s insane. Nobody knows who those guys are. I don’t know if it’s different now, the way you guys talk, but… did you go to art school?

F: No, I didn’t.

B: What percentages of the people you hang out with have gone to art school?

F: A good number of them have gone to art school.

B: There are levels of discussion of craft in what you’re doing, and I suspect that this is something that has changed. Partially, it’s the Comics Journal’s fault for expanding the vocabulary of the discussion of comic art and I think it’s the fact that so many people can go to school for comics and talk about comics in that way. When I lived in New York and was in comics, it was sorta, “Yeah, that’s really cool, what kind of pen point do you use? Oh, that’s neat how you spotted that black. Oh, you swiped Sergio Toppi, too?” It was always in the context of comics. Looking at the bigger stuff that might’ve come in. At one point Mike Mignola and I were talking about Charles Robinson and he was like, “You like that stuff? It’s weird because you never talk about that stuff.” I was looking at stuff, going into The Museum of Modern Art and looking at Matisse’s “Bathers by a river” before stopping at DC. You weren’t supposed to talk about, like Fine Art. To me, I wanted to make comics like Matisse. I just think the field built it up so much in the last 20 years, the vocabulary and the discussion of Art that you get out of art school, and I think it’s kind of phenomenal. In art school you would pull things apart a lot more. It’s a more critical approach to your own work and others’ work, where you’re always looking at it and pulling it apart. I think that always trying to analyze the work and what makes it click and “What can I do better” is not respected. It may just be that I could not communicate clearly, most likely, and so in talking about “work”, you were seen as a critical asshole. Mind you I was 25 and probably pretty much an arrogant asshole anyways. As my work would get rejected, I would get more and more confused about what to say and what was going on.

F: I’m discovering that even the most marginally critical point is met with resistance, or worse, it’s taken personally. Imagine applying that to the comics industry on a whole, or with editors.

B: The contemporary example I can think of is Chris Ware, he’s an exceptional cartoonist with great ideas who has made a clear decision that people with bad eyesight should work hard to read his comics. He’s made a craft choice that eliminates me from his readers. It’s visually just too much work to just read the words. It’s distracting to the whole experience of the comic. At times, lettering got smaller and smaller in some comics and when I pointed out that it made it hard to read, I was seen as dismissing the whole comic by the editor.

F: Discussing art in comics… I’m not saying it’s that common, but it does happen. I just assumed there were always little sects talking about that sort of stuff back in the day.

B: We talked craft and comics artists. I weirdly never met David Mazzucchelli until I was out of comics and I think we are on some of the same wave lengths around art and comics issues. But comics was an isolated field for a long time. The last 20 years have really opened up in a different way. Culturally, there was Marvel and DC when I started Gargoyle. I don’t think Dark Horse existed. Fantagraphics had just started publishing. There was no Drawn & Quarterly, Eclipse had just started, and First Comics… basically there were little Marvels and DCs.

F: Yeah, cut from the same fabric.

B: Oh, yeah, I mean, D&Q and Fantagraphics started transforming comics. The variety of comics you can buy in a standard store is just amazing. Mind you, I live in the Bay Area so my standard stores are covering the whole field that most people don’t get. Have you actually seen the Abstract Comics book?

F: Yeah.

B: It’s amazing. The design of it, the presentation… it’s just… these aren’t my comics but y’know–

F: I really liked the pencil version of your story. There was something about seeing it in pencil that was really impressive, really nice…

B: The fascinating thing about drawing in pencil is that you get to see the mistakes. That’s something that I’m really interested in drawing, to see the process in it. You can’t really see that in a done drawing, where pencil’s always gonna leave some of that process. That’s something that’s really good for the drawing. You can see the artist thinking. You don’t really see the writer thinking. Drawing is a process of work and thought cohering into this image. There’s a tension that I can’t quite resolve in my head about how much do you leave in of what you’re doing. All these artists going, “I wanna leave all my working drawing there so I can show all the people how the drawing is made. Gary Panter’s work builds all this stuff up into an overwhelming force. I don’t think I’ve ever read a whole story by him but I’m just stunned by the drawing. Jack Survives is one of the other comics where the process is drawn into the stories. Jerry Moriarty is a painter working in comics so he has more of, “I’m making a drawing, not I’m duplicating an icon.”

F: Right, it’s a different type of commitment on the page.

B: I’m always trying to figure out what I do that freaks comic people out so much. To them, Batman, this icon, this reality. That’s real, that’s their little diagram of the guy who beats people up, that’s real. Drawing him as an emotional thing, “You mean Batman is just a bunch of lines that generate emotions and not ‘reality’, are you nuts?” The balance of all the decision making is based on what my hand is doing, how I feel, the emotions of the drawing, what it looks like. I’m not duplicating the icon.  Stephen DeStefano freaks out when he watches me draw because I don’t do all the traditional construction work he does. I sort of “take the line out for a walk.” He just doesn’t understand how I can see the drawing. Perhaps that’s what people mean when they think my work is weird.

F: You’re creating your own iconography.

B: I don’t think comics are supposed to be “drawn” that way, and on some cultural level they really shouldn’t. If you have a repeating character, shouldn’t it be repeatable and reference some form of reality? I mean, even if it’s an animation style characters that are all made up of balls, that makes it a reality that the reader can enter into. I’m actually on Carabella using a lot more construction then I ever did before.

F: You really don’t think they should be drawn that way, that expressive way?

B: I don’t know. I really don’t know if process should be involved in the making of comics. I mean if I look at Baru, would it make it better to see his process of drawing? I don’t think it would. If I look at David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, the things where he uses the process of drawing are the things I like the least. I thought it worked really well, him drawing the characters in different styles and colors and the process of line that he went through. But it’s still the characters and the drawing styles are inked, finished and resolved. None of the marks on the page are not right. The thought process of the drawing, they’re still the usual perfect lines David does. Should he have left the process of line completely there? Or should he use the drawing style to make character icons? I don’t know. Would it make it work better? I’m ambivalent.

F: As long as it works for the story, I think seeing the process can work. It may or may not need it, but the story ultimately dictates that.

B: Well, that’s the thing. How much do you really need to tell a story? I mean, I can point to somebody who did a comic with stick figures and it’s sorta cool but I don’t really wanna look at it. It’s interesting, but the drawing wasn’t exciting enough. I mean, I don’t know if a fixed icon is enough, or if you actually need a cool drawing. As artists, we want really cool drawings. It’s one of those things that as an artist I need cool drawings to satisfy me, but as a reader, do I need that to survive? Am I just working for myself then? That’s probably what happens. That’s the whole challenge of doing abstract comics and what does it mean for representational comics.

F: Tell me a little about Carabella, your webcomic with Gerard Jones.

B: I’ve done a bunch of projects paid for by grants. I guess it’s the payoff for doing political work. Privacy Activism is a group that grew out of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One of the lawyers wanted to focus on just privacy and use artists to educate people about privacy. I worked on a game with them, sculpting the story and setting up the situations and all the branching structure. This time, the Rose Foundation, which gets its money from corporations who screw people’s privacy rights, forked over some money to make nice nice. Rose distributes that money to non-profits. So they got the grant, I brought in Gerry and we laid out a plot about building a back story for Carabella. It was fun to work with Gerry again because we’re both idea nerds. Our plots have always been driven more by things like Batman and Jazz, or Batman and real estate developers, or how do you do a Super Bowl story with [Joe] Montana and Bernie Kosar? So we had to pull apart social networks and what they actually could do if the government and large corporations used social networks as a tool to manipulate us. We of course know that large corporations and government would of course never try and control and manipulate us. I mean, when I go to Daily Kos, there’s no reason that I see ads for Marvel’s Online Comics right? With Facebook, they’re not tracking what I buy and what my friends do right? My government is not tracking all those demonstrations I organized and recording all my phone calls right? So Carabella is from a world that uses some advanced social networking tools embedded into everyone’s hair extensions. Everyone has to wear Princess Lea buns to be part of the network by law. She comes to our world and gets involved with a guy who embeds this technology into shoes as the perfect Twitter/Facebook tool. So can poor Carabella stop our world from becoming totally dominated by Facebook/Twitter linked into the essence of our souls?

F: How’re you drawing all of this?

B: It’s all drawn on Flash and we’re posting a couple of pages a week, and rather than just posting comics pages, I’m rethinking them to deal with the issues in screen proportions and the click instead of the page turn. What does it mean that panels can be animated? Playing with that while trying to not turn it into a cheap animated movie. I’m seeing what I can figure out about comics online that isn’t McCloud dogma or motion comics after-effects process. It’s interesting because it’s so separated from the business that I can do things that Marvel wouldn’t let me do in the AOL/Spiderman online stuff. So now it’s just Gerry and I doing the work, trying to get back into the mode of comics again.

F: What made you do comics in the first place? I’m assuming you were into comics as a kid.

B: Everybody of my generation grew up on Kirby and Steve Ditko as a little kid. New Gods stopped when I was in 8^th or 9^th grade. Neal Adams started doing stuff by the time I was in high school, y’know. I was a complete fanboy in high school. Barry Smith, Walter Simonson, the Studio guys and the Upstart guys were the pinnacle of cultural achievement in my mind. From there I guess there were a couple of books on English fantasy illustration put out by Ballantine and there were a couple of books by Frank Frazetta and a couple of books that covered Arthur Rackham and all those guys. There was a little bit of Art Nouveau. I mean, just thinking now about the richness of that fantasy stuff back in high school, there’s nothing like it. I was excited when I found a paperback with a Frank Frazetta illustration for a cover… that was a really big deal. “Oh, Mike Kaluta did a front piece on one of these things!” I mean that was it. It was all kinda like a serious, other world. Now you can find books on any of this stuff at a comic book store. So that’s the stuff that got me into it.

F: So was it through those guys that you discovered fine art?

B: What happened is I went to Parsons in New York and I went right into the illustration program because people that make gallery art don’t make a living with it, they all teach. They had a lot of interesting teachers just saying, “Go look at this gallery and yes you can draw really well but I want you to make this abstract composition. Oh, look, here’s all this really cool art that you haven’t heard about and here’s the Soho art scene.” They were very seductive to the young minds. My girlfriend from art school was really into fine arts, too, so that was kinda what turned my brain a little bit. I got very seduced by fine art and then gallery art and modernism and minimalism and the art scene in New York at the time. So I transferred from illustration to Fine Arts. I spent four years trying to make abstract comics in the fine arts program but got out and thought, “I don’t have to do all this intellectual stuff, I can actually draw comics and make a living.” I vividly remember slogging through some Jacques Derrida book and finishing it, the conclusion being essentially that all books were meaningless, and throwing it across the room. You couldn’t tell me that in the first chapter so I don’t have to read the whole thing? So from there I started going back and looking at superhero comics to break into Marvel and DC.

F: You found that you couldn’t do abstract comics for a living.

B: Yeah, there’s no market for abstract comics. Gallery art is gallery art and I think gallery art is really wonderful, but there’s something about it that didn’t work for me. I’m not sure what it is but I like the idea of a print book, a narrative with a story that you’re going to tell. The balance of my life of going back and forth between what abstraction is and the idea of telling a story is really… that’s fascinating to watch. I don’t feel like a pure cartoonist who has stories to tell in comics, but I’m an artist who really likes telling stories.

F: Right. Galleries and comics, two very different worlds not only in money but in what and how you can actually distribute the information. Totally different experiences.

B: Yeah, I mean the actual thing you’re making is two different… one’s very intimate and, y’know, you get to a point where gallery art people are just as pretentious as anybody in comics. I mean, it’s sorta easier to perceive as pretentious but comic book people can hide their pretention. Gallery people have all the same issues.

F: So what was it exactly that got you from studying fine art to then start working for Marvel?

B: You know what it was? It was a French guy named Hermann Huppen. He does Jeremiah, and the Survivor… Fantagraphics published some of his stuff. Jeremiah was even made into a sci-fi series with one of the Cosby show kids and somebody else, I can’t quite remember. He’s a European storyteller. So in my 3^rd year of college, Forbidden Planet opened up and they started importing European comics and I realized that you can do adventure comics that don’t have to look like DC Comics! In there, I probably discovered Tin Tin, Asterix, but the Hermann stuff was the start of it, and it was colored beautifully. I was just a point where Charles Vess and I would go to Forbidden Planet to buy one of these albums just for the coloring. Everybody was talking about that European color tone. That’s really what made me wanna go, “Oh, I can draw comic books now.” And I think the work I actually showed Carl Potts, the editor at Marvel, were pretty blatant swipes of the Hermann stuff and he was thought, “This is very interesting!”

F: So Potts wasn’t familiar with Hermann?

B: I think at that point he didn’t know that stuff. Carl’s definitely one of the more diverse editors. He definitely had a wider range of comics than the average guy. When you started with Carl, he would give you these little Xeroxes of old Chinese comics and they were drawn gorgeously with beautiful composition.

F: It’s interesting that he also broke in a bunch of artists with unconventional styles such as yourself, Tony Salmons, Mike Mignola, he worked with Kevin Nowlan a bunch… He took care of all you guys when another editor may have just dismissed you so I think there’s a lot to be said for that.

B: Well, Al Milgrom and Larry Hama were artists, too, so they had an ability to see a wider range of potential. The writers who become editors have the visual knowledge and taste of whatever’s the current fashion. I mean, whatever the politics of working in an office is determines what you can do. Guys who are just writers don’t go, “Hey, look, this is an interesting artist!” Carl was great, he was bringing in lots of talent, taking old guys and inspiring them. Sal Buscema and Don Perlin did some great work for him. I think he, or Al Milgrom, broke in Mignola… and Jim Lee, so Carl’s had a major effect on comics. If he started off just Mignola and Lee, Carl would still deserve some of the credit for major chunks of the industry in the last couple of decades. He’s one of those people no one really every mentions in terms of developing artists.

F: Tell me a little bit about working with J. M. DeMatteis on Gargoyle. How was it handling an entire mini series off the bat? Even just inking yourself was weird because they never let guys ink themselves around that time.

B: Carl was gonna get Al Williamson to do it and I was like, “That’s kinda cool, but what does he have to do with my work?” I didn’t know anything about inking or drawing at that point. I think Carl just let me take a shot at it. I don’t quite remember how it happened, like we couldn’t get the average Joe to handle the stuff, it was too weird.

F: Are your pencils loose and crazy sketchy?

B: Compared to whatever they can pencil art today I’m sure that they’re just beyond the boundaries of, y’know… it would drive inkers insane these days. But the Gargoyle job was pretty tight because it was my first job. There were all these tiny little lines etched on the paper and my drawing wasn’t based on copying other artists. So that’s why I inked it. There was some sort of discussion but it wasn’t that big a deal to ink myself. I think most people weren’t very interested in it.

F: The fans or editorial?

B: No, artists. I mean, I don’t remember it ever being a big issue to me. Sometimes I’d be scared of doing it, but… Kyle Baker and I would both do it because we were like, “They’re gonna pay us twice for doing the drawing once?” That was the logic. At least that was sort of our logic. The couple of times I’ve worked with inkers it’s always been very… odd.

F: Yeah, it kinda doesn’t work. I could see what you were going for, and I’m sure they had their own agenda, but it was… off.

B: The thing that really hit me, the one time I really remember specifically was with Romeo Tanghal, who is a fine inker for George Perez, but I did an issue of Green Lantern and Gerry. Being football fans, we did a football story and I drew all these football players. I had all this reference and I noticed that a football player’s calf muscle is different than a superhero’s calf muscle. There’s a sort of lean angle the way their lower leg is structured. So you’re drawing Jerry Rice and there’s a very specific body type, but Romeo inked it, and I’m sure it was partially his instinct to make the big bulging calf and that’s just the way he inks. That’s the iconography of superhero comics. In context, it’s right, but it’s not Jerry Rice, and I think it’s fair to say that my hand just can’t make the iconography of superheroes. So when I was inking people, it got “Badgerized” or just looked weird. Although, I did one Curt Swan job [Secret Origins #47, Feb. 1990] and when Scott Dunbier bought pages from Swan, Curt made a pile of the more “artistic” stuff. I was excited to hear that my pages got put in the artistic pile.

F: Even the iconography of superhero comics should be challenged.

B: I think there’s some dialogue always going on with artists where you’re drawing from relationships from the past and the history and the icons of what you’re drawing. The language of what you’re drawing. With what you’re looking at and what you’re bringing to your world, your work. That’s something I’ve never really figured out, the relationships in comics and how to bring in all the iconography. If you look at the comics, the iconography and the history of comics is sort of unified in a certain way.

(to be continued)