Evan Salazar is an unlikely figurehead for a cultural movement in comics, and yet here he is. The artist behind the self-published Rodeo series began working on the book in 2020, part of the brief but enormously significant wave of pandemic-fueled cartoon self-publishing that commenced that year.
Since then, he’s found himself, somewhat unexpectedly, as part of the vanguard of what RJ Casey has dubbed the “Post-Industrial Underdog Underground.” Certainly in tone and spirit, this is true: the characters of Rodeo are denizens of the rural and semi-rural West, simultaneously trapped in, and disconnected from, a coherent sense of cultural or geographic place in 21st century America. Whether that’s a reflection of the particular socioeconomic circumstances of today’s emerging cartoonists is a question best left to the pundits.
What it means, however, is that Salazar’s work is a world away from the cynical urbanity of the previous generation of critical darling cartoonists. His characters do not possess any of cold, cerebral distance from the reader that you’d find in, say, Adrian Tomine or Chris Ware: Rodeo is, on the contrary, a deeply approachable work right down to its visual style, heavily drawn from the visual art of newspaper comics, and the visual pacing of manga; on a cursory glance, you could mistake Salazar’s art for that of FoxTrot’s Bill Amend. But looks here are deceiving Salazar is not interested in gag humor (though he feels free to toy with it from time to time), and he’s not merely presenting autobiographical slice-of-life.
What he’s doing, at unforced pace, is steadily unspooling a multi-generational family story anchored in the person of the teenage Abigail Knox, whose search into the Knox family history, and whose beautiful but pervasive misunderstandings of the world she discovers, provide a running motif that anchors Salazar’s story. But that description sells short Salazar’s happy willingness to experiment: portions of issues hop suddenly between time, space, and whole genres, illuminating Abigail’s inquiries even as they build out the universe that Salazar is assembling. In this, his use of simple, streamlined art is a boon: it leaves the comic free to become anything, and take any chances, that Salazar wants it to without ever fundamentally changing its form. Rodeo is, in other words, as uniquely personal a project as any self-published series could be, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it.
That Salazar is doing all of this with the financial peril and the – to put it lightly – languid pacing that comes with an irregularly-serialized ongoing book is certainly a risk. In his case, however, it’s one that seems to be paying off: alongside critical recognition, Salazar won the Newly Emerging Talent Award at the most recent Comics Crossroads Columbus festival, which provided a boost of funding that’s helped to sustain Rodeo as a viable entity. A risk, then, but one that suggests the seemingly moribund format of ongoing indie comics just might have a bit of life left in it after all.
Earlier this year, I spoke with Salazar from his home in Tuscon, Arizona, where we were only periodically interrupted by his dog Margie. – Zach Rabiroff
Roots of the tree
ZACH RABIROFF: You’re originally from Arizona, is that right? You’re a Tucson kid?
EVAN SALAZAR: Yep. I was born in Houston, Texas, but my family moved here when I was about three years old. So I grew up here: childhood was here, late teens, early twenties. Then I went out and sowed my wild oats but ended up back here again.
Tell me about growing up in Tucson. What was that like for you?
As a kid I didn't like it very much. I think most people can relate to not liking where you're from, or thinking that it's lame or that it's boring. And I definitely felt that way about Tucson. When I was a teen, there was one cool record store. There was, maybe, one cool comic shop. There wasn't a lot to do. But once I moved, or once I visited Tucson again after moving away, I saw that this is the most gorgeous, beautiful place in the world. I realized how much of Tucson was in my blood once I came back, and I just sort of fell back in love with it.
What kind of kid were you, growing up? Did you feel that you were a part of the Tucson culture? A lot of cartoonists always describe being outsiders to the culture of wherever they grew up. Was that the case with you?
A little bit. I didn't start actively making comics until very late -- I would say 2016 is when I began making comics. When I was in Tucson, I was more into punk, hardcore. I was really heavily invested from a young age; from age 14, I was playing DIY punk shows in basements and VFW halls, that kind of thing. So when I was a teenager, even though I wasn't exactly taken with the bands that came through and the scene wasn't great, I still had a community of people: like-minded punks to hang out with and get to know. Without that, growing up in Tucson would've been dreadful. I was very lucky to have that from a pretty young age.
Just to situate this, which years are we talking about?
I'm 34, so this would be from around 2004, when I was 14. That was when I first started playing live in bands. Then I moved away to Chicago, briefly, when I was 22.
What kind of student were you when you were growing up?
An awful, awful student. Awful. I failed every single math class I ever took in high school. The only reason I graduated high school was because my guidance counselor is the brother-in-law of Brendan Canty, who is the drummer of Fugazi. My mom made me go talk to my guidance counselor when I was a sophomore in high school because I was failing all these classes. The guidance counselor is trying to get to know me: “Oh, what do you like, what do you enjoy?” And I tell him that I like punk music: Discord Records, Minor Threat, Fugazi. And he says, “Sure. I know Brendan; he's my brother-in-law. I would hang out with Ted Leo growing up.” So he took a liking to me pretty much immediately. I was probably the only student who ever came into his office to talk about Discord Records. Because of that, he pulled a lot of strings for me: he convinced the teachers to let me retake any test that I failed until I passed it. It was the agreement I had with a bunch of my math teachers.
Incredible. Fugazi literally got you through high school?
Yes. A hundred percent. Just by me talking about stuff I knew and liked. Most kids are probably too shy to talk about stuff that they know; maybe they think adults - - people in power -- might not care or agree. I'm surprised I was even honest enough to tell my guidance counselor that I like Fugazi, because I probably assumed he had no idea who that was. I was proven very, very wrong.
You talk about coming to comics quite late, in 2016. Did you read comics when you were growing up?
Oh, yeah. I was reading comics since I can remember. I was reading newspaper strips when I was a kid. Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield. I like the newspaper strips of the nineties, like Zits and FoxTrot.
I was going to go out on a limb and say that FoxTrot might have been an early influence on you.
A thousand percent. People with a discerning comics eye see that in my art. There are certain touchstones that they're going to see – [they’re going to see] Schulz, Bill Amend in there, without a doubt. FoxTrot was heavily influential to me as a kid, as I think it was to most people my age who were into comics. Jason, the main character, is a nerdy kid. I like the comics about the kids who are out there, causing mischief, doing their own thing. And you get older, and then you start to relate to the teenage brother. It’s a great, beautiful world that Bill Amend created. His style is just endlessly influential and inspirational to me.
What is it about the style that stood out to you back then?
That's a good question. I liked the clear lines and simple drawings that let the writing carry it. I've always been a fan of newspaper strips. They're simple, clear comics and everybody reads them, not just newspaper readers. So they have to be fashioned in a way that it's readable to your average person. I think that is a skill that you need to learn to be able to communicate with a reader in the simplest way possible. Cartooning, to me, is about using the fewest amount of lines to say the most amount of things. I definitely am inspired by the simple, meat and potatoes-ness of those types of comics.
I think about that a lot: that we are the last generation for which reading comic strips in the newspaper was the entry point into the medium. I feel like newspaper comic strips really informed the style of this current generation of independent cartoonists.
Yes. A lot. I grew up at the advent [of webcomics]: the late nineties was a watershed time for the internet and webcomics. When I was a little bit older in middle school I got really into Penny Arcade. There was also MegaTokyo, which was an Americanized manga-influenced web comic. When I got older, those kinds of comics really influenced me, but I quickly got out of it. I think a lot of people who are younger than I am grew up on webcomics and things like Perry Bible Fellowship or Dinosaur Comics, those sorts of popular early 2000’s web comics. Those took the place of newspaper strips.
You can still see that webcomic sense of humor in a lot of current work. I think a lot of people are heavily influenced by it. Maybe they don't know what Non Sequitur is or they don't know what Bizarro was. I loved Far Side, so I open the newspaper and see something that looks like Far Side and it reads like Far Side, and I’m into it. I was reading newspaper comic strips until I got into manga when I was around eight or nine years old, which is younger, I think, than a lot of people. Those took the place of like newspaper comics and my interest in them, although I was still into them, especially Calvin and Hobbes.
It seems as if there's an influence of newspaper strips on your work in Rodeo, even though the actual story you're telling isn't in the three-panel gag format of a newspaper strip.
Definitely. When I'm making comics I think about the reader turning the page. It is the major physical thing that a reader does when they open up a comic. And it's my view that the comic needs to give the reader a reason to turn that page. So I like to structure my pages in ways that are digestible and that have a beginning, middle, and end. To have a semi-cliffhanger that makes you want turn that page, and check the newspaper the next day, so to speak. I definitely take a lot of influence from that. There's this scrappy sort of storytelling to comic strips where five days a week you read it and it’s a gag, but when you read it all in one go, you realize a story is happening throughout. And, sure, there are punchlines and beats that happen at the end, but when you read it all together, you realize there's one cohesive story happening.
Yeah, FoxTrot and Calvin and Hobbes, which you mentioned, are great examples of that, where there are distinct arcs that you can see if you read them in a collected edition.
Definitely. And that's the kind of thing that I think about a lot. Truly, whenever I read a comic I'm basically begging for it to make me turn the page; that's what I'm interested in. I'm a comics maker, but I'm also a comics reader, and I can be critical of the comics I read. A comic should meet a reader halfway there. I hear a lot from cartoonists or other artists – musicians or whatever – who say that they don't think about the audience. They say, “I'm doing this for me. “And I relate to that to an extent. But I think about the audience a lot when I’m drawing, and about what their expectations are, and what they think is going to happen. I'm just trying to keep them invested, and interested, and convinced to turn that page. And hopefully as it goes on, the bigger story reveals itself.
You didn't start making comics in any kind of concerted professional way until 2016. Were you doing them for yourself when you were younger?
When I was younger, definitely. I got into manga when I was about eight or nine. I still have the first manga that I bought. It's a random volume of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. I bought it at Barnes and Noble, probably after Princess Mononoke came out in the United States. I think that was around 1998 or so, so I was eight years old. That was a true watershed moment for me. That was the beginning of a real push for manga in the United States between Viz and Tokyopop. I was getting really into all that stuff, and I would make my own comics based on those. There's this great comic that I used to love, called, Steam Detectives by Kia Asamiya. I loved Gundam, so I would make Gundam comics. I was a kid who loved drawing, but you get to around age 12 or 13 and you're gaining more of a sense of quality, and practice, and determination in these things. I had a moment where I realized that if I want get better at drawing, I really had to work hard at it. That was when I got more interested in playing music. I gravitated towards that, away from drawing. That was the last time I really seriously drew -- from around age 11, 12, until I was 26. Between that time I briefly went to college for creative writing, but as I said, I am not a great student, so I quickly dropped out.
But the intention was to become a professional writer?
Yes. I wanted to be a fiction writer because I love any storytelling. Storytelling is my passion. That's what I'm good at. Drawing can be like extracting water from a stone for me. It's very intense and grueling to get that image you want, whereas with storytelling, I can follow that thread for as long as it needs to go. It's just very natural for me. I went to school with the idea of being a fiction writer, but I realized that it's incredibly difficult to write 300, 400 pages.
So, yeah, fiction was my dream. I wanted to write books, but it's just too hard. I’d worked at tons of movie theaters my entire life; I've always loved movies. I moved to New York, and I worked at Film Forum for a couple years. It was through Film Forum that I got a job working on TV and film production sets, on a very low, P.A. level. I worked in that industry for about two years and burnt myself out. I realized that if I wanted to even make a no-budget movie that nobody ever saw, it would take all of my blood, sweat, and tears. Even if I was lucky enough to be able to make it. Most people can never make a movie, even a no-budget movie with a friend's camera. That's still incredibly hard to make. I saw how difficult that was, and I had this moment I said to myself, “Okay, I can't write books -- that’s too hard, I can't make movies -- that’s impossible. What's left for me?”
The first time I ever saw small press, indie art comics in the flesh, not on the Internet, was when I moved to New York in 2014, at Comic Arts Brooklyn. That was a really eye-opening experience. I went there because Charles Forsman was there, and I had just read the collected The End of the Fucking World. I didn't even know what Oily Comics was. I didn't know any of that stuff. I just dropped in there and I was shocked that this author, this cartoonist, was in this basement in Brooklyn. I walked around the floor, really blown away. I remember saying, “What is this?” I was seeing comics that I'd only seen on Tumblr before that, not even realizing that they were actually printed matter.
From 2014 to 2016, it was always rolling in my head. I would go to places like Mysterious Time Machine in Manhattan or Desert Island [in Brooklyn], or whatever, and I would try to pick things up and learn more about the world of comics, because I realized that what I knew was pretty surface level at the time, and that there was so much more to learn. Those two years [consisted] of really digesting comics, learning about comics, and figuring out what this world of independent art and self-published comics was. It took two years for me to feel that, okay, maybe I can do this. But that was still four years or so before Rodeo #1.
Even with that long process, it seems like there would have been quite a jump to feel like you had the technical capability to get into comics. Did you have any kind of formal training or practice with art at that point?
No. the last art class I took was seventh grade. One of the most influential art classes I took was a few years before that. It was at a community center at a park, here in Tucson. It was a comics class that this older guy taught. I don't remember the teacher at all, honestly. We were a bunch of kids: we sat around a table and we all made a two-page strip. At the end of the class, he put a zine together of all of our comic strips. I still have it.
But I remember in that class there was an older kid. I must've been eight or nine; he was older, probably 13. He saw that I liked manga, and he asked me if I had ever been to Our Galaxy, which is a comic shop in Tucson. I told him I hadn’t been there and he said, “Oh, well, you’ve got to go.” I remember making my mom take me right as they opened at 11 a.m. on a random Saturday. At the time, they were the only import shop in Tucson; they had imported anime soundtracks and untranslated manga, and you could rent anime DVDs from there and buy T-shirts and all kinds of stuff. It opened up my world. Any education I have was just by delving into it; reading it, copying stuff.
And that's when I made that true decision, in 2016, to make comics. I realized that my gift is in storytelling. Storytelling comes naturally to me. Still, I had to improve my art to the point where I could properly communicate the stories I wanted to tell. That took about four years or so. And that speaks to what I said earlier about how I want my comic art to be digestible. To me, the story's important. I want my art to almost become invisible to a reader when they're reading it, you know? I want them just to get lost in it. That took years of figuring out ways to subtract lines, ways to add lines, how to add depth, how to take away depth; trying to figure out the way comics worked. So, no formal training classes in any way at all.
What were the comics that you were doing to get to that point? Because the first time that you crossed my radar -- and for a lot of people I think it was the same -- was Rodeo. But that was three years after you had started working on comics. What was going on during those three years?
I made two zines between 2016 and Rodeo #1 that I would consider juvenilia, even though I was 27 or whatever. But they look like juvenilia: typical first comic strips that are angry about art critics or whatever. They have Mickey Mouse satire, where Mickey Mouse is a gunslinger, the kind of stuff that you have to get out of your system when you're first making comics. I remember I did one that was called Last Laff with two F's for “Laugh”. It was about an art critic and Mickey, I think [I did] a video rental store comic that my friend Dane wrote. He worked at a place in Chicago called FACETS, which was a movie rental spot and also a theater. He wrote the comic and I drew it, and it was bad. It was just bad. I tried tabling at this outdoor animation screening thing that my job at the time was putting on. And I definitely didn't sell anything; I think I gave away a couple copies, thinking that's what I should do, but not really being proud of the work for years.
So even at the time, you knew this was not it.
A hundred percent. I knew that I had a ways to go. I'm very clear-eyed with myself, and I just knew that what I was doing wasn't good, but I knew that if I just kept working at it, it could be better. Determination and seeing things through and finishing things – those are hard lessons to learn, and I didn't learn them until I started making comics. But I kept drawing, putting things together, and maybe a year or two later, I did another comic. This one was called Just a Bunch of Comics. And this one was a little bit better.
It was comics that were from disparate places, about disparate things I did; I just threw it all into this little zine. There are animation backgrounds that I did for a local Brooklyn film festival that I put in there to pad out pages, and I printed them. I put three copies at a used bookstore in Brooklyn called Human Relations, which was around the corner from my job. And two weeks later, I went back to the zine rack and all three had sold. I had a knee-jerk reaction of embarrassment and feeling a little crestfallen that this work that I wasn't really proud of was out there in the world now. There were people out in the world, people I didn't know, and my comic would be how they judged me. The guy at the register commented, “Wow, you sold all three copies,” like I was really popular. And I thought, “This is awful.” At that moment, I made an agreement with myself that I will not put out a comic until I am truly proud of it. It started to hammer home how I wanted to draw, what I wanted to draw, and the stories I wanted to tell. The next thing I did was Rodeo, a few years later. Rodeo really started to form in those two years between Just a Bunch of Comics and Rodeo #1.
Rodeo Takes Shape
Tell me about the genesis of Rodeo. You describe yourself as a storyteller, first. How long had you had the story there?
I think I wanted to make something that was more impressive [than the zines I had been doing]. I knew I had it in me. I knew that there were raw materials inside of me that could be crafted into something better. I started to go back through all the hard drives of stories, short stories I'd written back when I was writing. I started reading more and more books to get more and more ideas. I started collecting stuff. And eventually I started putting pieces together. Rodeo #1 is like a melting pot.
Where did the story idea came from?
Rodeo #1, specifically, was heavily influenced by two pieces of art. One, is the film, The Spirit of the Beehive by Victor Ese, which is a 1970s Spanish film about two young girls whose father is high up in Franco's dictatorship army. The girls are processing this world through their own eyes. Early in the film they watch the film Frankenstein, and they think it's real, and it scares shit out of them. And the whole film is about how they view their violent world and dictatorship through the guise of Frankenstein, thinking that Frankenstein is real. I was really grabbed by that.
By the same token, I was very inspired by the Daniel Clowes story, “Like a Weed Joe” he did for a random issue of Eightball. In it, he is recounting one summer at his grandparents' place as a kid.
Those two pieces spoke to me, and I wanted to extract what I liked about them and try to have them influence my work. To use them as a North Star, so to speak. Rodeo #1 was influenced by a lot of personal stuff and other random pieces that I've read or seen along the way. Luckily, when I cooked it all together, it came out all right.
The character of Abigail -- how did you go about constructing her?
I have a lot of love for Abigail because she's definitely heavily inspired by me as a kid. There's really no way of hiding that. I've been told that people read Rodeo thought it was autobio at first. I respond that it’s all fiction. People say that it seems so real, and that’s just because my characters are real people to me with real emotions. They don't forget things that happen to them, they have dreams and they have worries, they have their own weird little habits that maybe you'll never see on the page. But I know everything about these characters, and Abigail is a heightened version of who I was as a kid.
Well, the younger version of Abigail is a heightened version of who I was as a kid. Quiet. When no one thinks I'm paying attention, I’m definitely paying attention. And there’s the sort of magical way that kids try to make sense of their world. So whenever I think, “What should Abigail do next?” I think, “Well, what would a younger Evan do in this situation? How would he react to this sort of social situation or whatever it is?” Whenever Abigail has to make decisions or choices, I just tap into what I would have done when I was a kid. Every character is like that, as well. Anybody who writes fiction knows that you can't help but put yourself in your characters. You want your characters to have a level of reality to them, a level of true emotional depth. The only way to do that is to imbue it with real stuff that you've experienced, or you know, or you've thought before. I think readers pick up on those things, even if they don't know what's real or what's not real, they can tell there's truth in the soup.
I can see why people might make the mistake of thinking that Rodeo is autobio because -- especially in that first issue as you're sort of entering this world -- it's told with the trappings of a typical autobio comic. The story it's telling, however, is actually a much bigger magical realist mystery. I don't know how much of that was deliberate, or how much of it just came by accident of style.
I think it's a little half and half I, as far as literature is concerned. A little back history about me: I'm half Jewish, half Mexican. My dad is from the town Amos which is in Sonora, Mexico. My mom is from just outside Washington, D.C. – Silver Spring, Maryland – and she grew up in a Jewish family. Growing up, I read lots of Latin American literature and I read lots of Jewish literature. I felt very attached to those people. When I was a teen, I read Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, and those types of writers. I remember very specifically when I was 18, my dad showed me the book Aura by Carlos Fuentes. It was a very slim little magical realist book. And it just blew my mind.
It opened something that was in me for so long, and I realized that I understood where this book was coming from. I felt in touch with it, and I felt like I could write like that. I could write those sorts of stories. I’ve been heavily influenced by lots of Latin American writers: Silvino Ocampo is one. There's this guy, his name's Adolfo Bioy Casares. He did a book called The Invention of Morel which was later adapted into the film Last Year at Marienbad. 1 He is a genius writer who has that perfect economy of language while also imbuing plain sentences with magic. He is endlessly influential to me. I used that kind of guiding approach to Rodeo. I take it as a compliment when people think that it's autobio because that means they think there’s truth to it, which there is. It's just a fictional truth, which is the same as real truth. Just depends what angle you're looking at it from.
You mentioned Latin American literature, which of course very frequently explores that history, both in families in and in places, informs individual characters. The passage through generations becomes a big part of Rodeo. Isn't that a dangerous way to wade into a story, to think that you're going to tell this such a big, sweeping saga in your first comic?
Yeah. When I did Rodeo #1, I definitely had a vision of a large story. But at the same time, whenever I approach a new issue, that is the issue I'm working on. I'm trying to make this particular comic be a well-rounded thing that someone won’t feel they wasted their money on. So people ask me, “Do you know how it ends”, and the answer is, yes, I know how it ends. But that whole big storytelling thing, to me, is second to the experience of the individual issues. I was very happy with Rodeo #1 and Rodeo #2 because they're self-contained stories.
Rodeo #3 is the beginning of a multi-part story, which will be one chapter when it's all eventually in a book. I definitely want to show that this is a larger story happening now. That this is part one of a multi-part story; things are going to be opening up. The way I keep myself in check is by saying that things are opening up, but still, just keep this issue in mind. I want to make this issue something that is self-contained enough that people are satisfied when they read it. And of course, ideally, once it's all done and you read it all together, you won't even be thinking about how Evan is going to try to fit this all together or how he is going to get these pieces in place. You just watch it all happen in reading time/real time, so to speak.
Structure and Process
What was your process for structuring the story? How firm, at this point, is your knowledge and structure of what the issues are going to be and how the series is going to look as a whole?
I take storytelling very, very seriously. I have notebooks for each of my characters. And I have an emotional plot beat for each story beat that happens for that character. I'm always trying to make sure there is a weight to all that is happening. When I started developing [Rodeo], it started with a few images. It started with the image of the guest in Rodeo #1 with the bandage around his head. I was drawing somebody in my notebooks with a bandage around their head. It's a fun thing to draw. And I thought, “Okay, how can I put it in there? How can I figure out a story for this character? Who is this character?”
That was the first real thing is I was wondering: who is this bandaged man? And if that's the first thing I'm wondering, I'm going to make that the first thing the audience is wondering, as well. If that's the question on my mind, it will be the question on their mind. As I was writing Rodeo #1, I was developing the rest of the story as well. I would get an idea and I'd think, “Save that, save that. You can't put it in here.” I just wanted to finish a full comic. Rodeo #1 is very short because I had never finished a full comic before; I had to prove to myself that I could finish it. But as I was making it, I was getting all these ideas and the world was expanding so much.
I think that artists can get weighed down by that, and they think they need to put in every new idea. I just wanted to tell the story. I wanted to tell it right now and save all the new stuff to create something after this. That was the beginning of it – a man with a bandage around his head. And then I thought, “He's a mysterious guest”, which brought me to asking myself, “Who is he staying with?” These questions naturally just continue. If he's a guest, then who's he staying with? Why is he there? I just naturally follow those questions as they come.
John Stanley, the genius cartoonist behind Little Lulu, talks about how his ideas for comics were pulled out of thin air and just done. He said, “I didn't think about it too hard.” It's a different form of comics -- commercial, licensed comics and independent comics. Many writers can feel frozen by all the options and ways a story can go. For me, I just pick something, follow that thread and keep following that thread. Eventually I’ll start to build off of that thread and keep going with it. I don’t force it. When developing a story, there are points I want to hit, but I'm also never afraid of letting the story or the characters do whatever it is they want to do and go in whatever direction they want to go.
When I cede that control to the story or the characters, I'm led into places that my brain wouldn't have let me be if I were sitting there stewing over it, instead of just starting to draw. I see where the characters go when I draw them. I have sketchbooks that are filled with little strips that don't end up in the actual comic, but those little strips I'm drawing are definitely coloring and imbuing the way that I'm telling the story. It’s a juggling act to keep it a self-contained story that people won't feel annoyed by when it ends.
Everyone has read a comic before and thought, “Oh, wow, nothing really happened in this issue. Why did I read 20 pages?” And that's not what I want. I want people to get at least an image or two, or a moment of two out of the comic. And know that there are bigger things to come. The reader can tell, everyone can tell, when you force it.
Emotional milestones, if not necessarily plot milestones?
Definitely. The emotion. I think about how you'll read a comic that's the most beautifully drawn comic in the world, but if the story isn't there or if the emotions aren't there for me as a reader, it just leaves me thinking, “That was cool, but was it good?” There are comics that maybe aren't drawn amazingly, but the stories are very good. I'm trying to find that spot in the middle where I have more than functional art; the art functions in the service of telling a story.
Your choice to use that very stripped-down newspaper strip style seems like it’s in the service of that. It’s a simple, direct style that focuses the reader on the story.
Yeah. And that's by design, a hundred percent. American comics aren't always interested in story or moving along. Whereas with manga, you're ripping through pages real fast, it's all about the story. The art becomes invisible no matter how beautiful the art is. Those are comics that you want to get lost in. You want to be turning those pages, you want to feel that feeling in your heart, of “Oh, what's going to happen when I turn this page?”
That's what I'm chasing. So whatever I can do to make my art blend in and make you care about the story, that's what I care about. There are people who can sit down and just whip anything out. They can draw anything. It's gorgeous, it's beautiful. But that’s just not me. It never has been. I had to find a way to make art communicate the story, because while people probably pick up my comics for the art, my art is stripped down. It's simplified.
For that first issue, you used a quasi-anthology format. It's ostensibly an anthology book a la Eightball, except it really is the central story of Abigail, and then two stories that inform that story. It seems, at least to me, that you’re telling one larger story, but in a format that seems, perhaps, more traditional for independent comics.
Yeah. I love the “one person anthology”, as they call it. I love that format and that medium, whether it's the classics of the genre, like Love and Rockets or Eightball. I love Crickets and Ganges, where it's a longform one-man anthology story that can have different strips thrown in. I just love that format. I think it's a great place to have fun as an artist. I think readers like it, too. I've tried to put extra little strips and stuff in there, but certain printings have taken them out.
Rodeo #2 had a strip in the first printing that was loosely based on my time at Film Forum. But the truth is, I put it in there to meet the page count because to make a comic, it has to be in multiples of four. I had to have two extra pages, so I thought, “Well, let's do this little stupid comic.” But that comic, to me, just wasn't great. It didn't thematically tie in like the two stories in Rodeo #1 did with the rest of it, so I let it go. I'm not opposed in the future to putting random strips into Rodeo even if they're not necessarily thematically related. But as it goes, each issue of Rodeo is getting more and more dense. I have less and less time for these sorts of strips that ostensibly are just to pad out the book, but depending on the constraints, I'm happy to do. I think they can help liven the issue up. Still, I'm definitely more interested in focusing on the Knox family tree in the Rodeo stories.
That second issue with the longer page count goes into more of a longform narrative. You've made it a bit of a habit to shift up the perspective and the format with each issue you've been doing.
Yeah, and that's by design. I shot my shot when I made Rodeo #1 by saying it was a Knox family tree story; that we're going to follow this family, and not just the immediate family of Abigail and her parents. I was ready to figure out who these other people are in this family. And with Rodeo #2, I knew that I had to get bigger and better.
Rodeo #2 is an Abigail story, but I start to introduce characters like her uncle. I also introduce characters that aren't necessarily part of this family tree, like Lincoln Trutmann. He is a character I've been drawing since about 2018 or so. I drew a comic strip about him that I never finished because I didn't know what to do with it. But he was always sitting in my back pocket. I like the idea of a young kid who's this troubled genius photographer. It was an idea I really liked. And so when I was drawing Rodeo #2, I had to figure out how to get the uncle involved in the story. I knew the uncle was a part of it. But I didn't know necessarily how to introduce him. So what I did is, I kind of just cannibalized myself. I went back to Rodeo #1 and I thought, “What is something I can grab from this to put in Rodeo #2?” I saw that there is a random panel in #1 where I say that there are all these objects in Abigail's house that take on a heavier magical meaning to her. And in that panel you see that on the wall there's a framed photo of a barn. When I drew that initially, I had no idea what it was. And then when I was doing Rodeo #2, I remembered that I drew that barn, and I thought more about it.
I imagined that this character, Lincoln, was on a farm. And from there, once I made that simple connection, my brain couldn't stop, you know what I mean? I saw all these possibilities that I could fill in. I filled in the next five issues of story in my head because everything suddenly fit together. And with each issue, I see more and more and more connections between things that I can't help but make longer. I have to honor that, because for me, it's all about honoring the story I'm trying to tell. So if a story says this has to be a three-part, 50-page story, then that's what it’s going to be.
How long did it take you to do that first issue, and how difficult was it?
I think the first issue took me around six months, and it was hard. It was very, very, very hard. I had never drawn a comic like that before. All other comics I had drawn were two page, three page strips. I never told a full story all together. I had never drawn backgrounds, interiors, that kind of thing. I was learning as I was going. I drew a car in it that didn't look like any car I'd ever driven, because I had to draw a car. Nowadays it would look different, but then, I just had to keep moving.
Also, I draw my comics in black and white with grays. For the first two issues, I was using gray markers, and in Rodeo #1 and #2, I was applying the marker directly to the line work. That is pretty much a no-no if you want to have any sort of ability to edit or shift things around. That was a lot of learning on the fly for me. I would put down gray marker over ink that hadn't been dried yet, and it would get a little smear. I made lots of mistakes like that. Lots of sizing mistakes. I didn't know. I think a lot of people experience this thing where they want to know what brush to use, what pen to use, what paper to use, what size to use. All these things that seem very important because you want your work to look like or emulate the work that you've read, or the work that you like. I think I had that in mind when I was doing Rodeo #1. I was using a brush pen that I had no idea how to properly use. I was trying to make it appear as a “real” comic.
I struggled with that a lot. But for me, a struggle is good. Struggle means you're learning something, there are lessons to be learned. There was a time where I’d look at something I drew and say, “Oh God, I'm so awful.” But now I just do another drawing, throw the old one away, move on to the next thing using what I've learned from that mistake to make the next one better. From a technical side, Rodeo #1 was very hard, especially with scanning things in. I had no concept of super technical stuff when I was doing Rodeo #1. When I moved on to Rodeo #2, I was able to take those lessons I learned, and it was a little bit easier. Then it became harder again because the page count grew. But still, I had been through that initial trial period of Rodeo #1, and I saw what worked and what didn't work. Once Rodeo is collected into a book, which is the plan, I will have to redraw Rodeo #1 and #2 because of the gray marker and other things like that. Right now I don't mind that they exist like that, but when it's going to be in a more permanent format, like a book, I don’t want what I see as glaring technical issues to be published.
So in a sense, you're doing kind of a rough draft of it now?
A little bit. From here on, I definitely don't want to redraw any issues. They are going to go straight in the book as is. And when I say “redraw”, I'm basically going to retrace them. It's same drawings, just the grays on a different layer. That was a major mistake I made, and I had no idea. Who would have thought they were supposed to put the grays on a different layer? I had no concept of that.
Fame and Fortune in Comics
You made this first issue, you published it yourself. How did you go about promoting it? It certainly made a considerable splash. Were you surprised by that at all?
I was very surprised. I'm still surprised by any sort of recognition that I get. It was just luck. There's really no other way to describe it. I had some cartooning acquaintances on Instagram and they shared it. Then Bubbles published a review of it in one of their issues. I've heard people say they found Rodeo through Bubbles. If I'm being nice to myself, I think it happened because it's good work; the cream rises to the top. People liked it because it's good, but there's tons of good work out there that if you don't know how to sell it, no one will care.
I put more work into Rodeo #1 than I'd ever put into anything else in my entire life. I felt so proud of it; I had to do it justice. Prior to that, I shied away from any self-promotion, anything like that. It just felt gauche. It felt gaudy, and gross, and weird. And I thought, “That's not the punk DIY world I grew up in,” where you're self-promoting and putting yourself out there. I had to have a talk with myself because I wanted to honor the work that I put into Rodeo #1. So I made a point of hitting up comic shops that had no idea who I was, asking if they wanted to carry Rodeo. I made little ads for it, and posted them.
I tried to do whatever I could to get it into places where somebody might see it. And luckily, it worked. The only advice I can truly give is to email comic shops and ask them if they want to carry your comic. I care more about somebody buying my comic from a shop than any reshare on any social media platform at all. I love when I hear that people bought my comics from a shop that I didn't even know carried my stuff. My comics are distributed through Domino Books, and so comic shops and bookstores will order through Domino.
I've had people tell me that they buy my comic and they’re in Dallas. I never sold my comic to anybody in Dallas. They found it through Domino or Wig Shop, which is another great online retailer. I had a lot of people early on who, for no other reason than they liked my work, championed it. Wig Shop is a good example. Jeff [Alford] at Wig Shop saw my comics, he liked them, and he carried them. He actively sold them to people. It’s a matter of getting your work out there.
I talk to people who maybe have been doing comics for a while, and they feel like they are not getting opportunities or recognition, or they are not getting sales. And to those people, I always say, “At the end of the day, if you get anything mentally, emotionally, or spiritually when you're behind the drawing desk, everything else is second.” The traveling, the conventions, the selling, the whatever, that's all for comics. There is no money to be made unless you are one of the top five creators in the world.
Or unless you get a real book contract.
Yes. But, and even then, publishers give less than stellar advances or contracts. You may not get paid the way other creative fields get properly compensated for their work. So if you don't get anything out of the act of drawing comics, then maybe comics aren't for you. But if you get anything out of the pure act of drawing comics, if you need to keep pushing at it and working at it, and if you can not worry about those crops ever harvesting fruit, then it's all about the journey. That's my answer.
By the time you did the second issue, going all in for the bigger narrative of the Knox family, you were, at that point, counting on your readers to be invested in the story you're telling. Did that seem like a calculated risk to you?
Yeah. I'm of the mindset that if something is well-made, people will care. My taste in anything is from a formalist perspective. I don't care what your movie is about, what your song is about, what the play is about; I care about the technique, and the heart, and the intent, and the passion.
You talk about putting an emphasis on formalism, yet the way you're talking about coming into comics, it seems to me that formalism would be the most difficult thing for you to learn. You had never had any kind of formal training in that sort of thing. For instance, you've talked about certain techniques, like ending each page on a semi-cliffhanger to get somebody to turn the page. Where were you picking up things like that? How did you learn to do it?
From a variety of places. The book that opened my world to comics-making was How to Read Nancy, by Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden. I read it when it came out -- I think that was 2017. I was in that space where I needed to learn how to make comics. That book is amazing. If your readers haven't read that book and they make comics, they definitely need to pick it up. And even if they don't make comics, they definitely need to pick it up. It teaches you simple things like where reader's eye naturally wants to go, the way that you can use panel borders and the gutters, the passage of time. How you can extend time, or shorten time. Simple little things like that; things a common reader might not be thinking about.
That book was very, very eye-opening. I got a lot of inspiration from it. I did a lot of research into how people wrote comics. The Secrets of Life and Death is an art monograph of Jaime Hernandez. He doesn't talk too much about his process of storytelling in that book. He talks about how a story starts from just one image, and he extrapolates from that image. I use that.
There was a time where I thought I had to use a Windsor Newton brush or a certain Bristol board. And the truth is, you don't need to use any of that stuff at all to make comics. I wanted to use those tools because I wanted to reference older comics. I think this is a very common mode for a lot of cartoonists, to reference older comics and use them as a stepping stone into their own work. I wanted to use brushes and graphs or nibs; more classic, formal things as a way to convince the reader that my work was in conversation with other classic work. That was my intention. Now, as I've gotten more confident in my ability to draw, I've shifted away a little bit from classic cartooning tools.
I've tried to do a little bit more of my own thing. although it's still a fairly classic cartooning look. Now I am more relaxed than needing to have my Ames Lettering Guide right here. I've created lots of proprietary techniques. I have lot of panel borders of different types that I print off my computer, and I draw those. There are things I do to streamline the process now. Back when I had no idea what I was doing, I tried to figure it all out at once. Now that I’ve been professionally making comics for a while, I've developed my own techniques which marry classic traditionalism with a more streamlined approach on my end.
Do you find that you’ve become more confident with both your art on a visual level, and on your storytelling on a conceptual level by this latest issue [#3]?
I took a long break between issues #2 and #3 because I always knew that the next couple issues of Rodeo were going to be road trip stories. I knew I had to draw cars, and cars and horses are two very hard things to draw.
That's how the issue is divided. Two-thirds cars and one-third horses.
Yes. That was truly by design. I had to tell these stories, and to tell those stories, I had to get my capabilities to match. I like to challenge myself in that way, trying to get to a place where I'm feeling better, even though I'm never happy, really, with my drawing. I mean, I am happy with my drawings, but I can always see room for improvement. I've been getting really into the manga Slam Dunk lately. There is a creator, Takehiko [Inoue]. I watched a clip of him. He did a comic called Vagabond, and there's a part in it where he's drawing a beautiful, subtle, gorgeous piece of art.
He hands it to his editor, his editor leaves, and the guy behind the camera says, “So what'd you think?” Takehiko says, “I tried my best, but I couldn't make him [the character on the page] smile the way I wanted to make him smile.” The guy behind the camera says: “But it looks great.” And Takehiko replies, “The result is there. But in my head, it's doesn't look like he's smiling.”
I think that is something every cartoonist can relate to. It's always about bridging that gap between what's in your head and what's on the paper. And so for me, I'm always trying to push forward. I'm never satisfied. There are times where I'll draw something and think, “Oh dang, that's actually good!” and I'll be excited. But that's not often; usually it's more like, “That's good enough, let's move on.” I'm always pushing myself. I'm never satisfied with the art side storytelling.
You talked about this a little bit before, that the ultimate goal here is to collect Rodeo into one larger collection at the end. I wonder if you feel that the evolution of your style might work against it to some extent. You mentioned wanting to redraw those first couple of issues,
Right. I definitely want to redraw those so it all seems cohesive. I used to feel very self-conscious that you could look at, say, Rodeo #1 and look at Rodeo #3 and think, “He got so much better.” You can compare the “good” drawings in Rodeo #3 to the “bad” drawings in #1. But that's the case for every cartoonist that has ever existed. A classic example is that the early Peanuts looks way different than Peanuts does at the end of Schulz's life. They are of different eras. And the same goes for any other cartoonist. Slam Dunk, for example. The first couple of volumes have a very specific look. In the run of that manga, it looks like [Inoue] has changed his inking utensils. It just opens up and you think, “Oh, this is the way this is supposed to look.” But you wouldn't know that if you didn't have those early issues where you're watching him build and struggle.
I think a lot of people feel self-conscious when they see early work next to later work, but to me, that's just part of the game, and you're never going to escape that. I think it's confidence-building for new cartoonists to see that the artist progressed. You can read their early work where it looks cruddy -- or at least cruddy in comparison -- and you can watch them improve. That's the beauty of comics: watching a human being improve a drawing over time.
How has this been working out on a financial level?
That's a tricky question. I was lucky enough to win the Emerging Talent Award at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus last year, and that came with a $7,500 check. That's the most money I've personally ever seen from comics. And from what I can tell, from talking to other people who have been around much, much longer than me, you are hard pressed to find that kind of lump sum of money in comics. Which is to say that it's hard, financially, in comics. A comic costs twelve bucks; how many can you possibly sell to make a thousand dollars? It's a lot of hustling if you want to be a professional cartoonist who does it full-time. I did it “full-time” for a few years. I work a day job right now because I need the extra money.
That's not at all uncommon.
No, not at all. Not uncommon at all. I have friends who are in popular bands, and I have friends who are filmmakers and they're the same way too. They all have day jobs and they are all figuring it out, hustling, trying to make this art thing work for a living. I'm very lucky to have sold, I think, 200 copies or whatever, which, compared to the heyday of indie comics is not much. But for what I'm doing, that's more than enough.
Selling 200 copies of a $12 comic isn't going to change your life in any sort of financial way. So it's hard. You’ve got to reach out to people, find design opportunities. There are people who work creative jobs as their day jobs. That's something that I never want to do with my comics. I never want to do comics when I'm home and then go into work and be asked to be creative at work. I'm trying to save all of my creative energy for when I'm home working on my stuff. A day job is where I go to make money, period. I turn my brain off and just make money so I can survive and save all of my mental energy for when I get home and I can draw.
Very much like Harvey Pekar working as a hospital clerk, or Franz Kafka at an insurance company.
Yeah. If you want to be a successful artist, you have to have backup jobs that keep you stable. And especially now, those jobs aren't easy to come by. A stable job that pays fairly well is very, very rare in 2024. I have cartooning friends who try to make ends meet by making t-shirts and doing this, and doing that, and extending themselves so far to the point they're not even focusing on their comics as much anymore. Instead, they are figuring out ways to make money from comics. I'd much rather focus on making comics than focus on how to make money from them.
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The post Evan Salazar throws a <i>Rodeo</i>: ‘If something is well made, people will care’ appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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