Brad Neely's Creased Comics (NYRC, 2026) is just as funny as the Sistine Chapel, but so much easier to see up close. The cartoonist, writer, composer, voice actor and producer makes work with a playfully grotesque outlook on humanity, with an unmistakably distinctive voice (literally and figuratively) that is somehow for everyone. The glimmer of humanity's pain, vanity, grace, and irrationality peeks through gags strung together from the universal comedy that's existed since the dawn of time, the kind where you're watching someone slam into every possible obstacle while on a long, long fall.
His purposeful drawings depict the figure’s whole body: no skimping on hands and feet, legs that go all the way down, against writing more reminiscent of poetry than prose. Neely’s powers combine with an absurd humor, which has the unfortunate aspect of making people enjoy themselves, an activity which was labeled inconsequential during a vote that must have taken place on a day when both you and I were out sick. It’s not my fault that as a society we’ve decided the height of human emotion is a single tear rolling down a tight grimace. The next time your heater is on the fritz, pile on the works of Brad Neely. Creased Comics, China, IL, and the only suitable iteration of Harry Potter might not save your life, but it will soften the oncoming chilling embrace.
Brad Neely spoke with me over the phone for TCJ from his Los Angeles home this past April. Thank you kindly to Frances Beaver, Evan Trusewicz, and Sam Szabo for research and writing assistance.
What was the conversation like about page numbers resulting in deciding, "no thanks"?
What is a reason to have them in a book like this? The book itself is a flip to any page kind of thing, not necessarily a sequential read, so we said “Let's get rid of it, it's too distracting, these numbers”.
I'm not a numbers guy, so much. I'm pretty weak in that whole subsection of being a human, numbering is bad for me.
What’s your relationship with pranks?
Well, unfortunately, I’m a very gullible person. If you just kind of walk up while I'm not paying attention and start talking to me without any sort of audible steps, I'll just leap out of my skin. I've never been a fan of pranks. I don't like the prank shows. I feel bad but I am a gullible person's advocate. My wife has the prank gene. But it just never really ends up with laughs so much as, “I’m not sure what to do with this feeling”.
I think that's probably most pranks.
This is kind of a prank-free house. There's other joys besides the prank.
You draw a lot of horses. What's going on with all these cursed horses you bring into the world?
This is one of those things that was revealed to me, not necessarily a conscious decision. Early on, it was pointed out that I drew horses comically, I never really got their legs right. I think horse legs are kind of hilarious anyway. I include all sorts of animals in my cartoons because I think of the human as just another member of the animal kingdom. We just are kind of a little ahead of the game, so much so that we can ride around on fellow animals like a horse. That's so funny, you know, just a horse being kind of a car for people.
I do a lot of historical stuff, horses were just ubiquitous back then. You have to talk about horses if you're going to talk about it with any sort of verisimilitude. But the truth is, I mean, I didn't grow up around horses. Anytime I saw one, it was kind of like a magical moment. I thought, because I'm always trying to figure out, is a horse just like a dog? It seems like they're like a dog, but really kind of keep their cards close to their chest. I think a horse is pretty mysterious.
In what context were you seeing horses around growing up?
I can remember once, my parents went to a party, and they took me, and it was at a place that had a large backyard and there was a horse out there. And I remember just going out there because I didn't really know anybody at the party, being a child. I walked up to this horse and I just remember that being my, my primordial horse experience. It didn't do anything. It was like walking up to a statue of a horse. It may have been because I didn't, I didn't really have anything to compare it to.
A couple of Christmases ago when my mom visited, my wife bought us tickets to do the horseback riding around the Hollywood sign, and it was the most grueling adventure I've been on.
I thought this was a “no-prank household”?
They do it on Christmas. To me. This horse was a really wide horse. I didn't know that you had to like, do the splits to ride a horse. And so I was like doing the splits up the Hollywood Hills for two hours. I didn't know when it was going to end. I didn't feel stable on the back of that thing. My misery was very hilarious for my fellow horse riders. His name was Singer, that horse. And I just kept having to yell, “Singer! No! No!”
What's the scariest animal?
The invisible ones, the tiny animalcules, the viruses, the things you can't see are always the scariest. um Otherwise, just the kind that run up on you real fast. See, I’m back to being the guy who's afraid of pranks.
Are you scared of birds?
Apparently so. This is another thing that has been revealed to me recently. I didn't exactly realize it. I have a friendly relationship with a few types of bird in my backyard. I'll cut up all of our uneaten pizza into little crow-size bites and throw it on the roof of the garage and watch them come get it. There are these beautiful little sparrows who every spring build a nest in our backyard, we like to host them. Though I'm friendly with these smaller birds, death from above is sort of a scary thing for me, it comes to mind when I think of birds.
Do you think that our culture is friendlier to crows now out of fear, because it's more popularly known how much crows are paying attention?
It is kind of one of those things that’s a little bit of a fad, but it's a good fad, right? We're being a little more polite to some fellow creatures. I'm trying to figure out how to get them to do that thing everybody's talking about, where you do a good thing for a crow, and then they bring you some shiny bottle caps or whatever. But so far, these guys are just ingrates. I mean, they give me nothing but joy, and that's enough.
Hey, that's everything, right?
Well, you can't take it with you, baby!
When creating humor, do you feel more guided by amusing yourself or attempting to connect with others?
That is the fundamental question! I feel like with Creased Comics, it was more of a private self-expression mode of the arts. That's kind of how I break the arts up, especially in how I practice them. I work in television and obviously that's for an audience, it has its expectations and its structures, it's a team sport. All of this I only learned just recently. The first decade of working in television, I really was kind of still operating on the idea that this was a place for self-expression and, you know, fight for your and individual rights and all of that sort of thing. I was and am a slow learner.
I have kind of bifurcated my creative endeavors by exactly those lines. There is the avenue for self-expression and “fuck it, t's my way or the highway”. That is Creased Comics. I used to make them for my friends when I was a youngster, and that's kind of what shaped the spirit of them, just how a little friend group can have their own brand of inside jokes. When I was in my early 20s in Austin, Texas, I would make these cartoons and my friends would come over to binge drink and watch Big Trouble in Little China over and over. I would say, “Hey, take a look at this stack of cartoons” and measure their reactions. The next time I would draw more like the kind that they all laughed at,and less like the kind they didn't. There's some gray areas, but that's how I've been approaching things.
You had fine art aspirations once upon a time. What were you imagining the art was going to be that you created?
I still do fine art, I do a lot of work by myself, for myself. I do a lot of collage. Back in the day I was a very figurative-minded person. I went to art school doing life drawing and figure drawing and wanted to work in the figurative painting world, making representational art. Portraits and interiors, and that sort of thing, and I was okay. With Creased Comics, the kind of stylistic rule is to try to nail life drawing, but with a gun to your head: you have to just go as fast as you can. I see Creased Comics really as an extension of fine art, especially whenever I'm not thinking strictly like a joke, but I'm staying in the humorous zone, “I don't know why this is funny, but this is just kind of funny”. That feels more fine art to me than, say, a comic strip or cartoon where there's a clear gettable setup and punchline kind of situation, which occurs to me very rarely. That's not how my mind works.
The world that I feel most myself in is the poetic, nonlinear… working with the unconscious is sort of my way. If it feels right, it is right. You have to use the logical mind a lot more in television because you're talking about communication and there are strict lines of failure or success in those terms. You have to work much more of like “clarity is king” kind of rules Where you know in Creased I let my freak for flag, fly so to speak
Do you enjoy playing with sentence structure?
Yes, and no. I mean it does become kind of a job too, but that is the you know, a lot of the time these ideas come to me as lines of dialogue, someone talking, or a funny, bouncy sound line of sound. I've done a lot of musical comedy things, I think that is, that comes very naturally, working in musical verbal communication. Poetry is also one of those things that I didn't exactly realize I was working in for a good while, until I kind of read up on poetry. And then I was like, “oh, shit, this is all very familiar”.
Does singing make you joyful?
Oh yeah, for sure. Growing up, my mother- she is a wonderful singer, she sang my whole life, I'm sure, even while I was in the womb, of course. I came out singing, as we all do, but I guess I kept going. I love to sing, I don't get to do it enough. I should join in one of those choirs because it's just so much fun to sing with other people, blending your voices and making harmonies. And now my kid, she's a very good singer. So that feels like the best thing in the world.
Do you remember asking your mother to sing certain songs to you when you were a kid?
Well, no, unfortunately it was the opposite. You know, it's one of those things you don't know what you miss until it's gone. My mom's still around. She goes to choir and she sings all the time.
Despite the horse riding, she survived.
Right. She was really good at it actually. She's a smaller person, so they gave her a goat to ride.
[yelling] You let your mother ride a goat? Humans can ride goats?
No, I'm joking!
I really believed you-
It felt true for a second.
As a kid, she would get the guitar out and try to sing and have her me-time. I was a dick, as kids can be. And I remember the feel of running in and grabbing the fretboard with my hand to stop her from playing and singing so she would focus on me and my Star Wars. You're a parent, so you know exactly what I'm talking about. I got a big dose of that when it came my turn, too, to be the guy with the guitar.
You don't do the scam where you just set up your kids’ drawing stuff right next to yours so that they can also do their project?
That parallel play is a very powerful tool, but no- I think that my kid has also inherited the desire to work kind of by yourself.
We have our little areas in the house that are dedicated to just our own little worlds. And then we kind of have our community areas in the house as well. so there's a lot of someone coming out of their cave saying, “I have a lot to show, sit down!”
How has your art making changed since becoming a parent?
It's caused me to be more patient, listen better, be quiet, and not to try to dominate an exchange. Doing those things, you start to realize,” Oh, this person ah has good ideas.” Having a kid definitely rounds out the human experience in a way, with empathy and seeing yourself in the past with better clarity by seeing this sort of you 2.0 running around.
The connectivity to the past self definitely happens when you're hanging out with someone going through the ages that you've already cleared. So that's kind of doubled back on my life experience and enriched it. The kind of work that I'm doing now compared to when I started making Creased feels like work of the same mind, but has a broader range of interest, and I definitely can attribute that to being a dad for 14 years.
Wedding season, graduation season and Mother's Day are upon us. And the only gifts that TCJ readers are able to give are either Creased Comics, You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant, or the You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant audiobook. Which book is correct for which occasion?
… I would give the audio book to the graduate, the audio of my novel has the help of getting some of the ideas across through the delivery, the performance. So you don't have to be somebody who's experienced a whole as much life, you get kind of like somebody helping you along.
The book can be for mothers- an older person will know how to read it because that's all we had back in the day.
Creased Comics is for the middle person, the wedding gift. Creased is for everybody.
What did you like and dislike about performing and recording the distinctive audio book you made?
It was a strenuous affair. I did that during the COVID lockdown. I have a very nice relationship with Titmouse Animation Studios. Even though they, too, were locked down, they had just bought this great new three-story building in Burbank, just 10 minutes away from me. We had set up to do the production for a TV show out of those offices, it was complete. When COVID hit and they shut that building down, but I had an office there. And in my office, there was a whisper room, a little self-running recording booth where you could run your own recording sessions, which was very helpful during the times that we did cartoons. Especially when I did multiple voices, if we needed to do pickups or fill some things, I could just jump in that booth. It was like heaven just to be able to go to work with no commute.
We didn't have to rent a space or hire an engineer to run the sessions, I could just do it by myself. I had this fully functional self-operational recording studio in this studio in a completely abandoned gigantic building where the heat wasn't even on, all they had was a security guard. I decided, “Okay it's lockdown, nothing's going on… I wrote this book and hadn't even sold it yet, but I had to do the audio or it’s a deal breaker.
I set up a little schedule for myself and for two weeks I would go in and record a certain amount of pages each time. If I have a nice little expected regimen, I can do it. I just went in and really took my time in this completely vacant space, clocked in and clocked out and just got it done. I liked working alone, but completing it, and having this 11+ hour thing, plus the book, and nobody in the world knows or cares. Having to sit on that for as long as I did before it got out into the world was pretty difficult. That was the hardest part.
What was hard about that?
I work on things alone, on my own time and schedule. I have maybe two dozen projects that are alive right now for books, or art, or drawings, or music, or TV shows. I get ideas and kind of throw them into each bucket as I go. And there's some that are kind of like, okay, this is getting close to being like out or done, those kind of get more accelerated on real schedules.
Back in the day when I was cranking out animated shorts, I would make them over two weeks. I'd send them to Super Deluxe and they would put it out the next week. So it was every three weeks or so that I'd have a fresh thing out to people who liked that stuff and you got the immediate feedback.
It's kind of a... drug. So, you know sitting ah it's kind of a two, two sides of the same coin. I don't mind taking forever on a project, but once it's done, like once it's really done, it's like burning a hole in my pocket.
When you used to be a waiter, did you enjoy working front of house?
I was terrible at it. I did enjoy it because I didn't mind being chummy and helping people have a good night but I think I just wasn't suited for it. I always kind of ended up making people laugh on accident and ruining their little intimate things. You're not supposed to insert yourself into people's evenings, but I just kind of accidentally would do it, you know?
What type of place was this?
Oh, not fancy. I grew up in Arkansas and it was a nice place in town, a locally owned spot that had steaks and a full bar, but it also a casual vibe. I got in trouble once when somebody had asked that their order be boxed up, to go. Because I didn't know his name, I drew on the top of the takeout box a picture of the guy so it wouldn’t go to the wrong person.
You can't let the customer see that!
He got so mad and threw a big fit. My manager was great, he just kind of smoothed it all over.
We [my manager and I] went in the back, and he laughed so hard. And then that dude came back, apologized and said, “I realize now that was a good caricature” and all of this sort of thing.
That's a pretty good outcome, but I was really hoping you were going to say he came back clearly straight from the plastic surgeon.
My favorite stories are when people apologize. I think apologies are the greatest things. It feels so good.
Apologies are funny. We do them for a lot of different reasons, but I think we go to the cosmetic surgeon for a lot of the same reasons.
That’s the truth.
What does the phrase “philosophical terror” mean, and why is it so funny?
That's my bread and butter. I love philosophical problems, they’re universal- not just for philosophers. I think that all of us go through life experiencing the problems of the human condition, even if we don't know the scholarly words for those scenarios or situations.
In Creased Comics, I am able to depict those scenarios that have people in ethical or epistemological paradoxes where that it's hard to know the truth or you show people thinking how people really do, despite how we talk. Those sorts of things. Just the human condition being what it is, where you're born into this situation that you didn't ask for, and you slowly develop an awareness of it, and by the time you start to get a sense of what's going on, the generations come in waves and change everything up and then your body fails and your mind starts slipping away and you die. That's a pretty tough thing to just be okay with 365 times a year.
The best thing I've been able to do is laugh at that situation. Like many of the greats before me, I feel like it's the best to talk about in the arts because it is a timeless scenario, placeless around this globe. I try to, when I come up with an idea, I'm like, “Well, would anyone get this joke like anywhere, anytime?” And if so, I feel like I've got a good one.
You mentioned liking anthropological points of view and some of our silly choices as a species. I'm using the word “silly” very broadly here, but can you give me some of your, yeah, give me some of your favorite examples of these silly choices?
I love silly.
Obviously, I've got my eyes on the current events of the day, but I always try to find the timeless scenarios, the fundamental situations underneath all of the current events, and then to talk about those things without this specificity of the day. Those specificities kind of trap you in the topical, and hats off to the people who work in that avenue of comedy. I'm OK with that conversationally, but that's not where I like my work to reside. I do like the anthropological point of view as in just taking that Martian eye view of our species on this globe. And it's like, we're a species that does this and this and this. And isn't that strange when you back away from it?
I think that there's much comedy to be had from that removed place because everything is absurd beyond just trying to stay comfortable and being kind to one another, which is maybe the only real kind of universal truth that I can think of in terms of what we should do.
Everything else is kind of up for grabs and and and up for laughs too.
You mentioned having comics that are burning a hole in your mind, and papers that you would like to take a chunk of time aside to draw some more Creased Comics. Are you planning on drawing smartphones in your tbd comics?
God damn that's a great question. I've been thinking about that... Yes. Because I think that it still works to watch a Hitchcock film, and when Grace Kelly answers the big rotary telephone, we all still know what's going on. It's not like, “What the fuck is she doing with that thing on her face?!”
Even though I do strive to work in the timeless universal place, that kind of specificity becomes wrong to avoid at some points.I don't want to be detailing the the cuts of jeans of each of these little stylistic eras that I've lived through. But there's a way to abstract it where it just kind of feels like part of the whole scheme.
I just thought it must be hard to include them.
I mean, conceptually, yes, but technically, from a drawing point aspect-
[NEELY AND MADDEN] It’s the easiest thing to draw!
I mean, you have to make the hand right, the hand is what sells it. We all know the right gestures. Even non-artists can tell you, like “man, they're holding the phone weird”
Drawing anatomically is really important to me. You have all these tools of expression and these subliminal ways to communicate even just normalness or naturalness even in the junky brutal way that I like to draw in Creased I do have these standards that I like to keep where it has to read right, and the life of a figure has to be there, and that comes from really knowing the way around a human body.
In the visual language of Creased Comics you don't draw pupils, which in gag comics are often used to move the reader forward. How did you come to the decision to draw the Little Orphan Annie eyeballs for your characters?
Speed. I struggle with that stylistic choice. And I draw a lot with pupils for television as a tool for showing direction and sight lines. Sight lines are crucial in sequential storytelling, and you really can't do it with the Little Orphan Annie eyes so well.
There have been, of course, exceptions to the rule, but I think it also, I know that Tony Millionaire, that was his style and that worked. Sometimes [animation] ends up doing these cutesy things, but like we tried it whenever we moved Professor Brothers and Baby Cakes into China, IL. We tried the no pupil thing and animators were coming up with clever solutions, you know, with the animation vernacular of like squishiness and elasticity of that like little circle for the eye to show emotion. Usually the eyebrow and the direction of the head is all you need.
There's just such a standard of play. I think of television in terms of sports, really it's a team sport, like basketball. There are rules: you are successful if the ball goes in the hoop. The same thing is true for television, it works or it doesn't. That's not just for jokes, it's about communicating the emotions, the blocking, and all of that. It's a very sophisticated thing, the viewer's subconscious needs to be able to relax and enjoy a program.
With some of these new Creased, I'm like, “Why not draw the whole eye for some of these? Like, who cares?” But some people really love that eye, that Little Orphan Annie eye, and they get mad when I do anything else. And I don't know what to do there.
“You can't make anyone happy, any of the time”, isn't that the expression?
You can't make everyone happy. I hope I make some of them.
“You can't make anyone happy. But you might accidentally.”
You can't make anyone happy.
That's what I mean. It's just an accident.
I don't know. Hmm...
It depends: Do you have the ingredients to make a root beer float?
I get the Coke float sometimes at Baskin Robbins.
Does it make you happy, though?
Not like it should, you know?
Not like drawing open eyeballs?
I don't know if drawing makes me happy. I mean, I feel relieved to get things done. There's relief, but happiness, I don't think that's part of it.
Is this what you mean: You have an idea and think, “God damn it, I need to get the idea down”, then when you're finished drawing the panel, and you have the caption the way you want it, and you're done, you’re left with thanking God you don't have to have that idea in your head anymore?
Big yeah, bingo. There's joy in knowing that I have the skill, or when someone tells me that something made them laugh.
Do you like drawing?
I don't know how to answer that. I don't think I've ever drawn out of joy. Eating a piece of candy feels joyous to me or laughing and with friends. But I’ve always seen drawing as work. Even as a kid, it was work. It was enjoyable work, but I hated when I messed up a drawing and not being able to do the things that I needed to do in drawing and the growing pains of teaching yourself how to do things in drawing. That doesn't result in joy, it’s more like satisfaction.
It's fraught with anxiety, it's like chasing down a butterfly or something, you know, when you grab it, there's a 50-50 chance you're going to kill the thing.
Does the act of drawing, for you, exist because you need it as a means to tell the story you want to tell?
Yeah, it's communication. And there's pressure to communicate myself authentically and in a way that I can stand behind publicly. Even in a project like Creased Comics that on the surface is very irreverent. I used to make them as zines initially, and the look of it felt very punk to me on purpose. And the name too was like, “this could come out creased, this is rough on purpose” because I was Xeroxing these pages and stapling together my early collection. But even in all of that, I have my own standards I keep, and I want to make sure that these delicate thoughts are able to communicate, even if it's to a very small audience.
That anticipation of success or failure is also a painful thrill and maybe that's part of the chase. But like drawing is a tool for communication for me the same way as putting together a line of dialogue or poem or music. There's satisfaction in having the skill set, but there's always the anxiety of of fucking up a good feeling.
Did you draw copies of a beloved character or make derivative scenes growing up?
Growing up I bought a lot of Marvel Comics when I was young. and um i me and ah some friends would get together and and find our favorite kind of key frames out of X-Men or Incredible Hulk and do the old copy. No trace, but like a side-by-side kind of copy thing.
I learned so much from that. How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, really had a great impression on me, too.
I have a very smart older sister, and we used to go to the public library a lot. She would meet her friends, and I'd kind of tag along. They were all into fine art, and hanging around them I gained an appreciation of those kinds of works too, and I found myself copying those as well. I think that the blend of both really helped out. I did like some cartoons that would run in Sunday papers, like anybody back then, when I was a kid.
When I was younger, I had aspirations to be like Gary Larson, as he was the epitome of actually funny Sunday comics. God bless all those other people doing like the Garfields and stuff. But, you know, you can tell that it's like, “Oh my God, I've already done thousands and thousands of these, what the hell am I going to do now?” So it's kind of like a different experience, but Larson really like every time just punch you in the mouth with something, some real juicy idea, that set a bar for me.
Did you have a particularly favorite character growing up?
[long silence]
You're not betraying anyone if you forget them in the moment.
No, I like to get it right. I mean, there are things that I still hold on to that I also habitually draw. Wolfman is a big thing for me, and I watch all sorts of werewolf movies.
I like Scooby-Doo. Not the dog, but the kids
Did you have favorite kid?
I love Daphne.
I draw Daphne now. I was a He-Man and G.I. Joe kid growing up. I was their perfect audience. And I still very much think about those characters and the color combinations. Those guys are geniuses. Larry Hama for G.I. Joe and the people who designed the color schemes for He-Man, I think that really had an impression on me. Just the color relationships and the palette of He-Man and how it all really worked together is important work.
Without looking it up, we're both going to draw Daphne from memory. Are you ready to draw?
Do I do an underdrawing of pencil or do I just go for it with the line? Because those are two different things.
I mean, it's your minute, Brad.
I'm just gonna go for it with the line then. Okay, tell me when.
I mean, the outfit is the most important thing, right? 3-2-1 GO!
Yeah, I think we both nailed that.
I think it looks great.
I'm now thinking about favorite characters. I've been drawing the Jolly Green Giant a lot, and Hulk Hogan definitely is a thing for me too. I grew up liking watching him wrestle and, you know, and then he did a voice for us on China, IL. Right before, while we were waiting to see if we would get a fourth season, news broke of him, saying some very indefensible things, you know, which is not very good, and China got canceled. So that ended that relationship with him. Since I was a kid I just liked the design of him, the look of a mid-80s Hulk Hogan with the yellow boots, that ring, that curtain of hair, everything is perfect. I love thinking about it.
The Jolly Green Giant is great. The way he looks, he's fearsome. I think when it imprinted on me as a kid, it's a John Buscema- looking face with Conan eyebrows. He's got this hidden anger and a smug look, like he could stomp you. Then I guess they maybe did some market research and ended up making this little, little sprout to go around with him to soften it for kids. But I love that. I like it when they give him a red. neckerchief. I think that's really nice. He's completely in green. I like tone on tone, like green on green, different greens. And I think that that's appealing for me.
Daphne also has a neckerchief. I love them. I think they're great.
It's a great way to add a little distinction. I don't know if these exist, but if there's any way to see what were the reject designs for the Jolly Green Giant, I'd really love to walk through that gallery
I love that stuff. I like it whenever people do the postings of a character through the ages, you know? And there's always like one wild swing.
The one that got out of the lab too early, that’s the favorite.
I think that's the case for a lot of logos these days. I may just be old, but I don't like a lot of today's designs.
They mostly look like an anus with a circle around it. That's just what we're doing now.
If you were restricted to creating three dimensional art with no size limitations, what would you want to make?
I used to make a lot of three-dimensional art, I kind of like large stuff. I like spatial relations, even in two dimensions, you can scale and play with how you make a viewer feel by the position of the camera.
But in three dimensional space, it's fun because your body recognizes the piece and that's part of it. I think a lot of those large scale paintings from the mid-century, like the Jackson Pollocks or Barnett Newmans really make sense standing in front of them.
A lot of our generation discredits it because they've only seen it in books or on their phones or whatever, but standing in front of a piece, you, too are a thing in space along with this other thing in space is really fun to play with.
To answer your question, I think I would definitely go as big as I could. If stuff is super big it's very fun. I think it's maybe a rule that everything is more interesting if enlarged. Do you remember Jumpin’ Jack Flash with Whoopi Goldberg?
How could anyone forget?
In one scene she's jumping around, playing with a giant toothbrush, and it was the age where you could buy a giant Swatch Watch as a wall clock. I grew up in that age of these comically large normal things, this kind of old Oldenburg kind of universe.
Looking at those just makes you feel good.
I think so. Large sculpture does the same. It's like looking through a microscope, but you don't need any lens.
Do you think if you were working in three dimensions you would still be doing figurative work?
That's the best question. That's tough… Rodin is one of my favorites of all time. I used to live in Philadelphia, right around the corner from the Rodin museum. Luckily out here, there's a lot of Rodins at the LACMA and the Norton Simon, um, that I get to kind of just live
I went there to go to school at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art. It's like an old master's school.
Do you think that the pages in Creased Comics could hang up on the wall of a nice home?
That is something that I think about, one of those like checklists I go through, believe it or not. I am thinking, “would this look okay in my mother-in-law's house?” I'm lucky enough to have some people in my life who have very good taste and nice works of art hanging on their walls so i'm i guess always trying to keep in mind that
I draw the pages small, but I think I'm going to start doing some that are large, still drawing in that style. Growing up I was a big fan of Raymond Pettibone, and I think that's pretty obvious. He was right there next to Gary Larson. And the photographer, Richard Avedon.
Putting all of those together is kind of Crease Comics ingredients. Sure, it's comics and it's funny, but I try to still strive to make something that is visually feels like something that you could have hanging on your wall and you wouldn't get immediately sick of, or 10 years later you feel weird because it's like a promotion for one of the Spider-Man movies or something.
Did you grow up listening to any comedic storytelling?
I had the cassettes of Spaulding Gray that I would listen to all the time. Terrors of Pleasure, specifically. Those made a huge impression on me.
If you could find your ideal comic book um you know at Book Soup or or the the next zine fair you go to, what would it be?
I would love to find something new that felt old. I'd love to find something that is a younger person. No kind of judgment of anybody working in any tradition outside of what I am talking about, but I would love to find somebody who's young, but working in the tradition of the greats that I grew up loving. That would be very exciting to find, that's what an old man says when asked such a question
I'm always looking for something to spark my attention as do the likes of Eddie Campbell, Mazzucchelli, Buscema, or Frank Miller… Alan Moore on the writing side. I like those kinds of comics, I read them all the time, I read them over and over, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and From Hell. I love Elektra Assassin. It's one of my favorites. I love Bill Sienkiewicz, so incredible, right? I'm just kind of hung up on those standards.
Do you have any words of hope for our cTCJ readers?
My wish is that all of these words are hopeful. I feel like there's a place for individuals to express themselves and not feel burdened by market demands as much when it comes to comics and drawing. If it really feels good, go ahead and do it. The arts are a free space, even if it turns out that it's “just” a hobby, who cares? Even if it's crazy stuff or makes you feel vulnerable or exposed, that's what the arts are for, to share what you otherwise can't in life.
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Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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