Glenn Head Gets Hotwired
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on July 11, 2006 Sign up now!
by Douglas Wolk, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 7/11/2006
Glenn Head likes his comics cheap, fast and eye-popping, and he's corralled a bunch of other cartoonists who think the same way. Hotwire Comix and Capers (Fantagraphics), the new anthology he's edited, specializes in garish, sensational and noisy comics—window-smashing nuttiness from cover artist Michael Kupperman, R. Sikoryak's adaptation of "Dr. Faustus" into a series of Garfield strips, a psychedelic gross-out centerfold by Craig Yoe, and much more, including Head's own "Mindless Thrills!" and "Switchblade Shenanigans!," whose exclamation points say a lot. We spoke to him about how the new volume came together, and his plans for future thrills and shenanigans.
PW Comics Week: It's been a decade since your old anthology, Snake Eyes, ended—how did you get back into editing a comics anthology?
Glenn Head: I did three issues of Snake Eyes with Kaz, and at a certain point I decided I wanted to do my own stuff. So I did some solo books, Guttersnipe and Avenue D, and I was also contributing to Zero Zero and doing illustration work. At a certain point in the late '90s, things got really bad with the comics game, and I just got out of comics for a while. I got back into it by doing some weird sex art and some paintings—one of the paintings I did from that time is in Hotwire, "Meat Processing," an anthropomorphic sort of organic-machinery thing. I found I really enjoyed doing comics again. The market was better for comics, and there were also a lot of anthologies around, and I figured I might as well try one.
PWCW: What kind of direction did you give Hotwire's contributors?
GH: I wanted to try to bring some excitement to comics—I feel like that's really kind of dissipated right now. I wanted to check around and be sure there wasn't anything else that was like this, that would overlap with my own sensibility, and it turned out that there wasn't. A lot of books that are out there right now have a kind of poetic vibe—Raymond Carver-esque short stories with not much going on, that kind of thing. There's a great deal of humorless, pedantic stuff; there's not that much of a kick to it. The cheap, vulgar side of comics that's disappeared—I really wanted to bring that back. That's what I was into.
PWCW: How long was Hotwire in the works? There are a couple of drawings by Judith McNicol dated 1995 and 1997.
GH: I started work on it only about a year and a half ago. Judith McNicol was somebody whose work I'd found in a book at the Outsider Art Fair in New York. She has some kind of mental problem, graphomania, where she has to draw all the time. There's something very intense about her art that reminded me of Rory Hayes, or some of those other people in the '60s who were kind of unhinged or just trying to keep themselves sane by drawing. All the other stuff in the book was done very recently.
PWCW: Did you get contributions for the book that really surprised you?
GH: One thing that was kind of funny was the first strip in the book ("Car Boy")—I didn't even know what I was going to get. I commissioned it from this cartoonist Max Andersson, a Swedish guy, and I knew it was going to be silent, and that was really all I knew. When I got it, it was what it was, and I really do like it a lot—it's a bit of a surprise in the way that it's silent.
PWCW: Are you going to be doing any more volumes?
GH: I'm just starting to work on the second one right now, and it'll have strips by at least everybody who was in this issue. Tim Lane is working on a 20-page strip about riding freight trains when he was younger. It's completely autobiographical. He's also doing the cover. It'll be out about a year from now, most likely.
