Jerome Gaynor is one of the unsung heroes of Generation X underground comics. Think of that pre-internet generation of latch-key kids raised on TV who saw their boomer parents have their steady jobs restructured out of existence as America’s global reputation continued to tarnish. Individualism, pessimism, skepticism and irony are the traditional mating sounds of Gen Xers and those sound effects rattle through the pages of Jerome’s comics.
If you’re new to his work, it’s probably because: a) you’re too young to have been making comics in the 1990s; or b) because he has stayed close to his homegrown underground roots. His physical comics are not easy to find. But in more recent years, he has returned to comics with alacrity, putting out more books and posting excerpts of his work online regularly. As he mines his life for reflection and (sometimes) ridicule, you get a sense of what a great storyteller he is. His comics are drawn in a clean, simple style and are both revelatory and funny as hell, hitting all the beats with perfect timing. Though Gaynor doesn’t shy away from self-revelation and his own vulnerability, he skillfully wields a light touch with the heavier emotional content.
I personally became aware of Jerome Gaynor around the early 2000s. I’d read his 2002 Bogus Dead anthology but when I moved from England to St Louis in 2005, he became a real-life friend. The St Louis comics scene back then included Ted May, Dan Zettwoch, Kevin Huizenga and Jeff Wilson – but comics never seemed like Jerome’s sole focus. Megan Kelso was a contributor to his '90s anthologies and told me, “Jerome is one of those people who is a community builder. Perhaps it’s from his early punk days or maybe it’s just part of his nature. I've always felt like those people in comics are rare and special because comics attracts so many loners. ... We're lucky to have these people, who balance their own artistic pursuits along with group projects that bring cartoonists together.”
Though not consistently a cartoonist per se, when Gaynor would reemerge back into the comics scene his work always seemed confident and fully formed. John Porcellino, another contributor and longtime friend, recalled the first anthology Jerome put out. “The Flying Saucer Attack book … had a lot of Spit and a Half people in it. It was back when the world of "alt-comix" was still so small and everybody knew everybody. Spit and a Half back then was like a family almost. We all contributed to the same anthologies etc. Flying Saucer Attack was to me kind of the culmination of that '90s Spit and a Half scene. It was so good, everybody brought their A-game."
In the Midwest, Gaynor was infamous for creating the legendary website STLPunk, which started as a punk-centric message board, but grew into a proto-social media site much like Facebook or MySpace, but years earlier. At its peak, 30,000 teenage kids logged in every day to talk shit and find out where their favorite bands were playing. It was just one of the many projects that pulled him away from comics. Jerome used his IT skills to fund his other interests, such as skateboarding, yoga, aerial arts, traveling the world, as well as becoming a self-taught house rehabber – he’d fix up properties he’d buy dirt cheap around St. Louis’s decaying neighborhoods. Amidst all this activity, he also raised a child during that time.
Gaynor's more recent renewed focus on comics has made me personally take stock of the amazing body of work he’s amassed over the years. His earliest comics are featured in his self-published Funkapotamus series (later retitled Punk Anonymous). These zines are hard to find now (which Gaynor claims is a good thing finding them too cringey), but they contain some real gems. Tales too True to Tell Episode 2 from Funkapotamus #6 (1994) is a real stand-out. In it, Jerome is a bored teenager goofing around with his equally bored suburban friends. At the story’s climax, they tape their friend Keli to a pole with masking tape as passers-by look on with disapproval. Jerome speeds up into the future and 6 years later, there’s still masking tape on the pole. It’s become this strangely touching private landmark, evoking a vicarious nostalgia in the reader. But in his deadbeat tone, narrator Jerome ends the story with a shrug, “I was so bored.”
Such stories are echoed in his most recent book Weird Brain (2024). In The Stupidest and Best Night, a teen Jerome drives around at night with friends but nothing happens as every diner or potential hangout spot is closed. They just drive around, listening to music and as the story shifts to the present day, Jerome argues with himself about the validity of even drawing this comic as an older man. In the midst of feeling intense alienation from his young self, he then encounters validation in the sweetest way from one of those old friends over social media. It’s such a wonderful story for me, highlighting one of his recurrent themes: Friendship can be seen as an energy akin to poetry or art. It’s life-giving and it transmits to the reader like experiencing a contact high.
For the aforementioned Flying Saucer Attack anthology (published 1995) he included his own story, Microwave Brick 3. It tells of his female teen protagonist – the smartest kid in school – who makes a CB transmitter and hacks into the local radio tower. She starts listening in to alien broadcasts and by entering a trance state (or a state of grace?) is able to understand what their plans are for earth – mass euthanasia. The story ends on a beatific note where the protagonist willingly complies with the death order and puts herself to sleep rather than trying to regenerate the human race. We’re just not worth it.
For this interview, I asked Jerome about this and his other comics via text and email, as he now splits his time between St. Louis and a little medieval village house in Northern Italy.
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MARDOU: Jerome, I love that Microwave Brick story. I find a real irony to the character’s nihilism as being as smart and poignant as she is, she’s unwittingly making a case for what’s worth saving about humanity!
GAYNOR: You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that. Well, I guess it speaks to my penchant for the paradoxically tragic! In 1995 I was obsessed with the concepts of suicide and the end of world, what can I say? I can’t think of that comic without thinking of how just after it was published, John Porcellino casually introduced me to my hero at the time, Ian MacKaye from Minor Threat and Fugazi. Before I had a chance to recover from my shock at meeting him, Ian recognized my name and told me he had just read my alien comic the day before and that it “fuckin' blew him away.” That was probably the happiest moment of my life up to that point!
That’s very cool. I love Fugazi. And I think there's something very Gen X and youthful about that pessimistic worldview in that story. But 30 years on, now our world is sliding into being uninhabitable for real, it doesn’t feel like a trope any more, does it?
Hmm … it’s not because I’m Gen-X and youthful, but – sorry – yes, I really believe the (human) world is doomed. The fact that it is sliding into being uninhabitable for real feels more like evidence that supports this rather than the opposite!
I remember feeling vindicated in my so-called pessimism when I read Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix, where he frequently plays with this overarching natural cycle: Living organisms evolve toward greater intelligence, achieve sapience, and develop technology, but can’t evolve their consciousness beyond the competitive impulse that propelled them forward in the first place. So they end up destroying themselves with the fatal combination of competitiveness and technology. I had intuited this tragic cycle when I was in college studying biology and world history and was amazed to see this great genius using it as the central idea of many of his graphic novels. I’m grateful to Tezuka, a fellow biologist/cartoonist, for helping me find acceptance of the likely destruction of humanity in the understanding that nature contains cycles that are much larger than any single individual or species. All we can do is try to be as conscious as possible while these difficult days unfold. Nothing lasts forever.
And that Microwave Brick story was fictional with a female protagonist, but you didn’t stick with fiction, you moved towards autobio. How did you come to that creative decision?
Honestly, I really wish I could make fictional work – autobiography is embarrassing. I’m not famous or especially important – why would anyone care about my life? And I hate the idea of appearing self-obsessed. But I am rarely able to write fiction without it feeling contrived. When I write about my own life, on the other hand, it doesn’t feel at all contrived – the process of writing autobiography is emotionally intense for me, which tells me I’m not forcing it. I definitely feel the power of what I’m writing. That feeling could be mistaken, of course, but I know for an absolute fact that I’m not being phony. Writing fiction feels less vital, so I feel less compelled to do it.
My life isn’t much more remarkable than average, but I have always enjoyed finding the connections that make stories pop, and pinpointing the moments that make ordinary events funny or poignant. And I love thinking and writing about why certain connections or moments have impact. I realize that all these things can be done with fiction too, but at this point working from my own experiences is just more fun.
By the time you edited the 2002 anthology, Bogus Dead, you were a parent. You approach a fictitious zombie apocalypse story from that point of view – helping your 5-year-old daughter to escape to a rescue station on her own, as the cartoon character Jerome prepares to die. You’re helping her find fellow humans and hoping she’ll make it. It’s such a touching story to me about how becoming a parent informs you as an artist.
When I hatched the idea for that zombie anthology, I had just become a parent, and was struggling to manage the intensity of love and anxiety that parenthood generates. I hadn’t written my story for the book yet, and one day I was flipping through a Time magazine at my parents’ house and saw this picture of a guy my age at the time, mid-20s, carrying his daughter in the desert, running for their lives with nothing but their clothes. It was a high-definition close-up; you could see the dirt on his face, and you couldn’t help but extrapolate that they were unlikely to survive. I instantly identified with this man, but I couldn’t do anything for him – a well-fed American in a suburban kitchen 7,000 miles away. The only dignified response I could come up with was to look the truth in the face, this could have been me. At any point, society could collapse and the lives of everyone I care about could be destroyed. So, absurd as it may sound, that comic was an attempt to spend time inside that reality. I suppose it’s a bit like the stoic practice of visualizing the thing you fear most, to neutralize the power of that fear.
On that note, sorrow, heartbreak, social anxiety, trauma and shame feature in your work and you talk about having coping mechanisms that stopped working in middle age (oh, how I relate). So where do your comics land with all that? Is drawing this stuff a form of processing for you? Is making art a kind of transformation?
Yes, absolutely my comics are a form of processing. Earlier I said I do autobiography because I don’t feel as naturally oriented toward fiction, but I think partly that is because of how strong my need to process is. Sometimes I’ll think how fun it would be to write fiction, but when I try, the autobiography just keeps stepping in front of it – the unfinished business of the past demanding to be dealt with. Occasionally I imagine that once I process enough, my ability to write fiction will appear. In the meantime, hitching my comics to the runaway horse of my impulse to process is doing great things for the quantity and quality of my output so I’m running with it.
You’ve worn so many different hats in your life. From dazed and silenced Catholic school kid, to skater punk teen, medical school drop-out, IT guy, construction worker, yoga enthusiast, aerial artist, Italian speaker, traveler, and genealogist and, importantly, parent! But you’ve described your various interests as distraction from comics. Where do comics fit in your life now?
When I was a kid in Catholic school, every year in religion class there would be this activity where we’d have to write about our “mission,” which was like the purpose that God supposedly had in mind for us. Which is such a bizarre, intense concept for a modern artsy progressive person to think about. Every year it was obvious to me that my mission was to be an artist. I stopped thinking of myself as Catholic pretty early on, but the idea got permanently lodged in my head, that on some stone tablet in heaven was written: “Jerome must be an artist!”
Problem was, being an artist wasn’t considered cool in my working-class Midwest neighborhood – I didn’t get much positive attention from my peers for it, especially the “bad kids” that I was most attracted to. So I decided to become a juvenile delinquent instead. But I also worshipped my grandpa, who was an ex-Marine, athlete, good at everything kind of guy, and he really encouraged me to work hard in school and was super proud of my grades, etc. So as I approached young adulthood, I took this weird path in life that consisted of somehow being simultaneously a reckless skate punk that snuck out of the house every night to commit petty crimes, and somehow also a straight-A student that maintained a record spotless enough to eventually get into medical school. A strange and intense time.
I ultimately decided to quit medical school, but the experience of managing to get accepted had given me this absurd confidence that I was capable of anything, and it had also gotten me hooked on the thrill of impossible challenges. So I would get obsessed with some new interest, take historic architecture for example. But instead of reading a book about it, I went out and bought the cheapest, most hopelessly destroyed house I could find, and then spent the next five years figuring out how to put it back together.
The other things you listed there pretty much unfolded the same way. I’d become interested in something, then obsessed, then I’d just work like a dog until some lofty goal was reached. Then I’d get bored, and go looking for the next obsession.
All through those years I would draw here and there, but never very seriously. And all along an impatient voice in my head (God’s?!!) was nagging: “dude c’mon, you’re supposed to be an artist!” And finally, about 7 years ago my therapist explained that one way of thinking about depression is that it’s what happens when you aren’t pursuing your “purpose.” She made me commit to spending an hour per day drawing, which in fact improved my depression very effectively, and since then my art practice has gotten more and more consistent. I’m glad I finally started focusing on comics. It’s so fun. Hopefully God can finally chill out now.
Can we touch on that religious aspect? Christianity often rears its head in your comics – usually as oppressive, patriarchal and something to fight your way out of (challenging St. Jerome for example). What’s your relationship to that punitive/Christian undercurrent now?
Well, I’m definitely not a Christian. But I live in Italy half the year, about a mile from the 400-year-old church where my ancestors attended mass for centuries. I have started going on Sundays for the first time since I stopped going with my family when I was 17. The church is gorgeous – there’s a massive and grim Caravaggio painting on the wall depicting St. Peter being nailed to a cross. (A Caravaggio in the church of a town with 500 people! Napoleon personally donated it to the town, I’m told.) For an old painting, it’s very emotionally intimate, almost horrific – Peter is sort of trying to sit up and looking directly at the nail in his wrist with a look of shock on his face. It’s exactly the way I would have drawn it, which makes me wonder how much of my style was absorbed from the dark Catholic psychodramas my ancestors soaked up for hundreds of years.
The acoustics are fantastic and the parishioners have amazing voices. The pastor has manners from another era. And hearing the mass in Italian turns it into fresh poetry with real impact, instead of the script I’ve heard so many times that it’s become meaningless. So yeah, not a Christian, not a believer in any kind of theology, and in fact I get angry even thinking about Catholic authority, due to the way some of my classmates & I (not to mention thousands of others) were treated as children … and yet I definitely derive something crucial from the ancient complexity and dark aesthetic of traditional Catholicism.
I’m curious about one story (Punk Anonymous 9) where you profess to hate drug-taking as a form of escape. Is that true?
Well, that comic was done when I was around 21, in one of the darkest depressions of my life. Its hypothesis is that there is nothing real except pain – so the rationale behind my rejection of drugs and alcohol was simply that they might make me feel better, which I perceived as a weak betrayal of the reality of infinite suffering! Which is like so ridiculously teenage goth nihilistic that it would be funny if it weren’t insane. Not long after I made that comic I discovered psychedelics and my attitude changed dramatically. At this point I’d say it’s just a fossilized record of an extreme opinion I once held.
But there’s a trippiness in your comics which seems to come from chasing natural highs, yoga, chakras opening, ecstatic dream experiences. Can you talk about that trippy nature to your work?
Life is trippy! The world is a miracle; walking around in a body is a miracle. It’s really hard to remember that though – it’s safer to be sober & serious. But if I go too long without experiencing some kind of freaky magic life becomes dull and miserable, so I am always chasing a balance between those two polarities – common sense on the one hand, and transcendent awareness on the other.
Once I was at a hippie camp in upstate New York and I heard this yoga teacher say, “Gravity is always pulling you down, man … if don’t get high, you’ll die!” which I thought was a hilarious and perfect formulation of this predicament. So now I think of “getting high” as a basic need, like food and shelter. When I notice myself starting to feel like life sucks, I’m like “okay Jerome, stop working – it’s time to do the responsible thing and get high!”
I usually do that with meditative physical stuff like yoga, weightlifting, and aerial arts, but also yoga nidra meditation, hiking, riding my bike, and of course drawing comics.
But sometimes comics are the opposite, they can feel very cramped and mental and uptight. Comics are really a pretty square medium – most people that make them are nerds (myself included), and they are actually made out of squares, and they proceed linearly, and they’re usually kind of small, you have to look really close to understand them, so they make you nearsighted and they generally just encourage this slouched, myopic posture! I find the plots of Little Nemo a bit dull, but the grandiose, surprising compositions of Winsor McCay are some of the only comics that completely avoid this claustrophobia. I will obviously never be as brilliant as that guy, but I do enjoy letting my impatience with the cramped comics feeling lead me in weird directions and I’ll try to break the frame or let the story take a wild turn into another dimension to give it a taste of fresh air.
My favorite thing of all is when I happen to become half-awake in the middle of the night, and my conscious mind blends into the dream world. When I’m able to collect the images and ideas from that strange place, and turn them into physically real drawings and comics, it is really the most fun thing in my life. It’s like the only time that those two halves of reality integrate and I don’t feel split in two. The fact that it is such an unpredictable & rare pleasure makes it even better.
You have a fascination with drawing dreams but I’m curious if they inform your sense of spirituality at all? In all the major spiritual traditions dreams have been a big deal (think Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible and the Buddha's mom to name a couple). So, are your wild and trippy dreams a big deal to you? Or are you just having fun here?
Oh, it’s a big deal AND I’m having fun. Isn’t fun a big deal? In my childhood miracles, prayer, divine revelation, etc. were presented as real things to me (which was cool), but on the other hand, from a very young age all physical movement and emotional expression was strictly forbidden for the greater part of the day (which was very uncool). All those hours spent sitting rigidly in church and school, holding everything in, getting stomach aches and neck aches at age 7 turned me into a hopeless smart-ass. It’s like the Emma Goldman thing nerdy anarchists always quote: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” – my version is like … “if I can’t bring a whoopie cushion to church, eat my shorts.” Or something.
Finally, you're in a new era of life. Like the Roman goddess Proserpina, you get to escape the hell of the American Midwest and spend a good chunk of his year in the beautiful Italian mountains, your ancestral home. Are comics about Italy pending? What’s next?
Oh, hey, I like being compared to a Roman goddess! It’s true, my life is embarrassingly sweet at the moment. There’s just so much to learn and say about Italy though. It’s a whole new world, and almost everything is surprising and funny –when it comes to writing comics about this experience, it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ve drawn almost 30 pages about Italy in the last few years, but I keep starting over because my understanding shifts so frequently that they feel inaccurate before the ink is dry! I’m on my fourth year here though so hopefully the perspective will stabilize soon.
Beyond that, I have a ton of funny and sad stories to tell, and my enthusiasm for comics has never been stronger. I have rudimentary plans for a full-length graphic novel, to tell the most important story of my life, but don’t feel skilled enough to pull it off yet. Everything I’m doing now is working toward that end.
The post An interview with Jerome Gaynor: ‘Isn’t fun a big deal?’ 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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