Ted Naifeh is the exciting young comics creator behind such diverse work as the goth-romance series Gloomcookie, the all ages title Courtney Crumrin and alongside Tristan Crane the ground breaking look at queer culture How Loathsome.
How Loathsome is his most famous work, being praised from all quarters including The Nexus’ very own The Nexus Files which praised it as a must read comic because “it speaks a bold, simple truth of loving people for who they are not some dumb category. How Loathsome is more than just a sexy piece of queer-literature, it’s a modern parable for open-mindedness and self-realisation.”
Ted Naifeh recently spoke to the Nexus’ Manolis Vamvounis and Will Cooling about How Loathsome and some of the issues it raised.
The Nexus: Thanks for agreeing to do this interview with us Ted. If one phrase would sum up Ted Naifeh what would it be?
Ted Naifeh: Filthy/Gorgeous
The Nexus: How did you first break into the world of comics?
Ted Naifeh: I took a portfolio to a convention here in the Bay Area. First convention, first job. It was a heady time, back in 1990, when the balloon that was the comics industry was swelling, Image had just been created, indy comics were selling six figures, and they just needed warm bodies that could hold a pencil. I drew a bunch of Batman pages in my bed at my folks’ house, and took them to show. Landed a gig that day. A few years later, the balloon popped, and my later, better portfolios wouldn’t get me the time of day. But it’s all water under the bridge now.
The Nexus: What writers/artists have influenced you?
Ted Naifeh: Over the years, so many. In art, Frank Miller was an early influence, as was Matt Wagner and the French artist Moebius. Later, I discovered the Painters, John Muth, Kent Williams, and, to a lesser extent, Bill Sienkiewicz. Then, Dave McKean came along, and ruined me for all the others. I’d picked up some really bad habits from each of them along the way. It’s tough for an impressionable young comics artist of dubious skill to discover such natural talents. We can’t even tell what they’re really doing, and to try and recreate it is a doubtful exercise. Anyway, at some point I discovered Mike Mignola, and came back to earth.
With writing, it’s hard to put a finger on my influences. I certainly don’t have a strong educated background it the field. I’d say I read a lot of early Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Matt Wagner, bla bla bla. Lately I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett voraciously. But my all time favourite book is The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. I first read that when I was 22. It still has a strong influence over my work, even all these years later.
The Nexus: You write and draw your comics. What advantages does doing this bring when compared to the normal practice of dividing writing and art duties between two (or more) creators?
Ted Naifeh: It’s less work, for one thing. Not nearly so much narrative description in the scripts. Also, I find that, unless I’m being very sloppy, there’s a singularity of purpose between the words and pictures. They blend more seamlessly than in my normal experience working with another creator. I have a tough time seeing other artists draw my stories. I become simultaneously a horrible control freak (in my head, at least) picking out all the things I’d have done differently, while at the same time, I suffer horrible insecurity, seeing all the little tricks and clever ideas I’d never have thought of.
As an artist working with another writer, I usually try to just be the write’s hands, and serve the story as much as I can. But sometimes I can’t help putting in a few little touches of my own. Most artists appreciate this, or at least, seem to. Overall, I find the situation much more relaxing. Putting out a script into the world and hoping for the best is so worrisome.
The Nexus: What first motivated you to create How Loathsome?
Ted Naifeh: I was looking for a follow-up to Gloomcookie, the goth romance comic I’d worked on the previous year. It was a tough decision to quit that book, but as an independent creator, and especially as an artist, I needed to make more than just half the profit on a work that took so many man-hours to create. Anyway, I’d thought up several story ideas for Gloomcookie, and felt ready to tackle writing a whole piece. How Loathsome came to mind as a sort of more adult, more alternative version of Gloomcookie. Years before, I’d become a big fan of this local spoken word author named Danielle Willis, whose lush world of androgynous goth junkie prostitutes captivated me. I started writing a few stories of my own, basing the main Character on Danielle, and the experiences from the few forays I’d made into the sexual underground. It took off from there.
The Nexus: How would you describe How Loathsome to someone unfamiliar with the project?
Ted Naifeh: How Loathsome is a faux-autobiographical comic about a semi-gender-queer person named Catherine Gore, who lives in San Francisco. The story kicks off when she meets Chloe, a gorgeous transsexual girl, at an S&M play party. Problem is, Chloe isn’t attracted to girls, and though she’s eager for men to see her as female, she can’t get past the fact that Catherine isn’t really male.
The story isn’t a traditional three act narrative, but rather a series of tales about Catherine, her friends, and the world they live in. Some of the stories are actually fictional tales written by Catherine, little asides that give you a view into her inner world.
The Nexus: In an interview with comicbookresources.com you said that at first you tried to write How Loathsome by yourself but found it to be too much a challenge to do by yourself. What was it in particular that you found too much of a challenge?
Ted Naifeh: I found two things challenging. For one, I was still fairly inexperienced, not used to thinking like a writer. I needed someone to brainstorm with, for starters. But more importantly, I needed to work with someone who knew more about the genre, and the world upon which the genre was based. Enter Tristan.
The Nexus: What did Tristan Crane bring to the project?
Ted Naifeh: He’d read all the best known “gritty queer writers” like Dennis Cooper, etc. He even read J.T. Leroy, back when J.T. was a young junkie ex-rentboy dying of AIDS, and not just a fictional character like Catherine. Tristan also had a trove of personal experiences to draw from, though I’ll let you ask him about them.
Basically, he came in and ironed out what was initially a cheesy goth comic with crass pretensions into what I consider to be a genuinely rich, reasonably profound piece. I shudder to think what How Loathsome would have been without him. Probably nothing, to be honest. I’d just about given up on the thing and turned my attention to my younger audiences books like Courtney Crumrin, but Tristan brought it up again, asked me how it was going, and finally, offered to help me pull it together.
The Nexus: How did writing with Tristan differ from writing by yourself?
Ted Naifeh: There was more arguing, to be sure. But basically, we ended up with a system for developing ideas that were twice as good as anything we singly could have come up with. If I had an idea he didn’t like, he’d change it when he did a pass on the script. If I didn’t like his change”¦ well, we’d argue about it for a while. But eventually one of us would come up with something we both agreed on, and we always liked it better than either of our original ideas. It was a great way to go. We got some great lines and turns of phrase that way.
The Nexus: The lead character Catherine Gore is gender-queer, something that is rarely raised even within the gay community. How important was it to Tristan and yourself to bring such a seemingly ‘taboo’ subject to the fore?
Ted Naifeh: Honestly, that was the whole point of the book, and the whole appeal of it for me, a genuinely androgynous, gender-defying character. Catherine’s deal isn’t that she’s a woman who wants to be a man. She just wants to be who she wants to be from moment to moment, without having a gender assignment on it. I know that sounds odd or obscure to a lot of people, but we rarely think about how much gender identifies us. To reject the unconscious dogma of a bi-gendered world is a pretty major rebellion, and anyway, makes for what I thought would be a dynamic character.
All that said, I didn’t really have a huge axe to grind about it, I just thought Catherine cut a great figure, and had interesting stories. How Loathsome isn’t a book about issues or crusades. That stuff’s important, but it doesn’t belong in the fore of stories. And furthermore, if you push it to the fore, you end up with nothing but a piece of propaganda, waving a flag, just as thoughtless and close-minded as the opposing points of view. To me, good stories shouldn’t offer simple answers. They should ask complex questions. Questions provoke thought. Answers, especially inadequate ones, only preach to the choir.
The Nexus: Perhaps the most distinctive thing about How Loathsome is its artwork, with every page looking completely unlike anything else in the comic industry. How did you go about devising such an original style for your artwork?
Ted Naifeh: Wow, that’s high praise indeed. Well, I’ll tell ya, I think it has something to do with not being good enough to copy my favourite artists. If I’d had my way at one point in my career, I’d have been an exact copy of Dave McKean. I used to present him with crudely executed pictures I’d stolen straight from his work, expecting approval. I wasn’t the only one, either. He was very gracious, but, I think, unimpressed.
Nowdays I don’t bother trying to have a style. I just draw what the book seems to demand. Courtney Crumrin, for example seems to demand pointy four-fingered hands. Polly and the Pirates demands round stubby legs. I don’t mean to have a unique style, seriously. I’m just struggling to juggle my influences into something reasonably coherent. Sometimes I wish my work was tighter, more consistant. But I gave up trying to be a virtuoso artist like McKean or Mignola, whose work changed the way people draw. I just want to tell stories. I don’t think I’m the best artist out there, or the best writer. But somehow, the combination of the two is greater than the sum of the parts. At least, I hope so.
The Nexus: In the first issues Catherine’s story is interrupted by short sequences of comics/illustrated prose that are credited to be written/drawn by Catherine herself. What is the importance of these sequences to the overall story? How did you need to alter your narration style for these, seeing s they were supposedly written by your fictional writer?
Ted Naifeh: As I mentioned before, I wanted the stories to reflect Catherine’s inner world. I’d gotten the idea from Danielle Willis, who wrote both autobiographical stuff and really dark fantastical fiction, a delicious combination. I wrote the first story about the girl living near a forest full of vampire spirits. Tristan knocked it out of the park with the second story about the Japanese monk whose boy lover is reincarnated as a geisha.
I wanted How Loathsome to be a series of short stories for two reasons. One, so anyone could pick up any issue and not get lost. And two, so I could play around with techniques. I think I came up with some great tricks, especially with the Monk story. Those may be my best pages ever.
The Nexus: One of the closing scenes in How Loathsome condemns gay bigotry/phobia towards transsexuals. How big a problem do you think such bigotry is today?
Ted Naifeh: I hung out with a guy last week who mentioned that he couldn’t even begin express his resentment of the white man. Later on, he was chatting with my girlfriend, telling her how much he adored his little niece, all the while talking over her, not letting her finish sentences, even though she was talking about his subject. He just didn’t care what she had to say. When talking to me or the other guys, he wasn’t nearly as bad about it. Later on, he was telling me some story ideas, (and they were pretty good, actually) and I commented that one element he mentioned might be considered a bit sexist. He waved away the notion, saying that he couldn’t be bothered to worry about how his ideas sounded to the politically correct culture nazis. I thought about it later, and came to the realization that he was kind of a hypocrite. If I’d come up with a story that he thought sounded racist, you can bet that, whether I considered myself a racist or not, I’d get an earful about it, and deservedly so.
It seems to me that often times among downtrodden communities, the most vocal advocators for fair treatment are only concerned about their particular group. They don’t see mistreatment of communities as a problem in itself, only the mistreatment of their community. This guy I mentioned wasn’t a bad guy, but he was so full of his own trouble that it never occurred to him he might be guilty of the crimes he resented in others.
When I hear off-hand negative comments from gay folks about, say, bisexual people (Dan Savage, I’m looking right at you), it’s not that I don’t understand where they’re coming from. But they’re not bothering to understand where the bi folks are coming from. Being gay in this f*cked up world is incredibly challenging, and tends to leave deep emotional scares. Anyone who goes against the grain of society tends to get splinters. But if you want society’s understanding, you’d better damn well be prepared to accept people you don’t necessarily understand. Everyone has grievances, but if we dismiss people because we don’t understand their motives, for whatever reason, then we give up the right to complain if others dismiss us.
Hah, so much for my anti-propaganda platform.
The Nexus: Danielle Willis through her introduction to the book mentions how the locations and people in the stories (the voyeuristic three, Nick, the alien insect bar) are recognisable to her, portraying a San Francisco she has inhabited for the last years. How many of the characters and situations in How Loathsome are based on real people and events you have encountered?
Ted Naifeh: Me personally? Well, as I said, Danielle herself was the model for Catherine. As for the other characters, Alex has a little bit of Tristan in him. Chloe is based on several trans girls I’ve met over the years. Nick is the filthy sexist asshole I always wanted to be, but am too decent a guy to allow myself to become (stupid conscience). Dragshak is closely based on San Francisco’s famous Trannyshack, the coolest drag show in the world.
Also, many of the stories are based on stuff that’s happened to me or Tristan. The S&M party in the opening scene is based on parties I used to go to when I was younger, where leather queers and serious SM dykes played in the same spaces with suburban swingers. I only found out later that parties that mellow and all-inclusive were pretty special, once an era phenomena the like of which doesn’t exist in SF today. Anyway, that’s the kind of book I’d wanted from the beginning, something that rang true, but felt a bit magical.
The Nexus: What’s your opinion on how queer characters and issues are portrayed in comics?
Ted Naifeh: I don’t read a lot of comics, so I can’t really comment. I’m not a big Marvel or DC man, though I hear Judd Winick does a decent job portraying queer folks. But queers in mainstream comics exist on sufferance. As an example, I wrote a story for an X-Men anthology a few years ago. Tough assignment. It took me weeks of reading X-Men books with long, meandering plotlines that seemed to go nowhere before it finally dawned on me what X-Men stories are really supposed to be about. They’re about tolerance, right?
Anyway, the story I wrote was going to be about Nightcrawler, in which he tries to volunteer at a church, only to find that the pastor doesn’t want folks seeing him. He can sweep up, so long as he keeps out of sight, but he isn’t gonna be doing the soup line. Long sotry short, things go bad, and he ends up being airlifted out of the smoking remains of the church by Northstar, who invites him to come volunteer at his own church. Nightcrawler had no idea Northstar worshipped. He’s curious. The next and final shot was to be a depiction of Nightcrawler standing between two towering drag queens in their Sunday best, leather daddies and butch dykes in the background. Northstar explains that if Nightcrawler wants to promote tolerance, he should start with his own.
I wrote it out, and the editor loved it. Then some higher-up saw it and freaked. He didn’t have anything against it personally, but at the time, Marvel was going through a “conservative phase”, and didn’t want some red state mom suing them because little Johnny is reading homo propaganda. I ended up pulling the story rather than censoring it, and we did a story about Emma Frost instead.
On the other side of things, I’m proud of DC for pushing forward with the new Batwoman. I hope it comes out right. But they’re a corporate entity as well, and their bottom line is more important to them than depicting queer characters in any light.
I thought Enigma got it perfect, the idea that whatever the mysterious source of the main character becoming gay, he just went with it. I thought that was cool, a neat little sci-fi comment on the nature of sexuality.
The Nexus: Can we expect a sequel to How Loathsome? If so, when?
Ted Naifeh: I don’t think so. We’re more likely to just do something similar, maybe through Image or another major publisher that can really get the book noticed. HL didn’t do badly, in fact it did better than we’d expected, but it wasn’t exactly a golden calf. The next book I do like that, I want to get it as visible as possible. I want to break out of the narrow comics market and into a larger venue.
The Nexus: What can we expect from you in the future?
Ted Naifeh: Right now I’m focusing on my all-ages books, like Courtney Crumrin, Polly and the pirates, and Death Jr. As to the future, who knows. But I did have an idea for a comic about a cross-dressing bartender in a queer bar that gets mistaken for a deadly female government spy. It’s sort of “North by Northwest” with a tranny.
The Nexus: Is there anything else you would like to say to your fans?
Ted Naifeh: To those who bought How Loathsome, thanks a bunch. To those who haven’t, take a chance. It’s cheap and easy, and not just because it’s available on Amazon.
The Nexus: Thank you for sharing your time with us.
Ted Naifeh: No prob. Thanks for still remembering my book.
