Nick Bertozzi Meets the Modernists

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Jan. 2, 2007 Sign up now!

By Douglas Wolk -- Publishers Weekly, 1/2/2007

Brooklyn-based cartoonist and teacher Nick Bertozzi hasn't published a lot of comics in the last couple of years, but that's about to change. The highest-profile book due to appear is his five-years-in-the-works graphic novel The Salon (St. Martin's Griffin), a supernatural murder mystery set in the bohemian Paris of 1907, starring Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire and Georges Braque, among others. Bertozzi talked to us about the roots of The Salon, as well as the comics biography of Harry Houdini he's done in collaboration with James Sturm and Jason Lutes, and a few other projects he's got in the works.

PW Comics Week: How long did it take to do the research for The Salon?

Nick Bertozzi: It took me a while. I read a lot of books on Picasso and [Erik] Satie, I read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and I skimmed a book of Apollinaire. I started doing the research after I started doing the book in early 2002—I was doing it a page a week on Serializer, and I was about three weeks into it and suddenly realized where the story was going to go, so I ended up doing a lot more research.

PWCW: Since you deal with it a little in The Salon, what do you think is the relationship between "fine art" and cartooning?

NB: In The Salon, there's a scene in which Picasso is trying to finish the Gertrude Stein portrait he's been working on—he really did take 80 sittings to complete the portrait. At the same time, he was also reading all the cartoons that appeared in William Randolph Hearst's papers. He'd take them from the Steins after they were done reading them, and he was a big fan of the comics. So it wasn't much of a leap for me to say that the comics influenced his art—from my perspective, I don't see a division at all. [Those artists] were incredibly inventive, blowing up convention and having fun doing it—I wanted to demystify these crazy, funny, interesting people. I love the experimentation that's happening in comics now, too—I wish I was more of an experimenter. I'm not, though; I'm more the guy who walks around the battlefield after the champions have fought their battle.

PWCW: You've got a book about Houdini coming up. What's the story behind that?

NB: It's called The Handcuff King. James Sturm and I were working on a proposal for a Hollywood producer; we did a 10-pager together, and it just wasn't going to work out schedule-wise for us to do the book, but we really had a good time working together, and The Golem's Mighty Swing is maybe my favorite comic book ever. He contacted me about three months after that to let me know that Jason Lutes, who was working on this Houdini book with him, wasn't going to have time to do finished pencils and inks for it. He said, "I'll pay you to work with Jason Lutes's thumbnails." I said, "You're going to pay me to learn? Sign me up!" When I teach my class at SVA, I show people Jason's thumbnails as the gold standard. The book's only 84 pages, so it wasn't this huge five-year-long tome—it took me a year to do. It's perfect!

PWCW: What's the class you teach?

NB: I teach the Comic Book Storytelling Workshop, which is for junior and senior cartooning students to hone their storytelling skills, learn about pacing and mood; they learn about how to construct a clear story. My other class that I just started teaching is Principles of Cartooning, where I'm teaching sophomores—it's more the basics: How do you put together a page? How do you use the Ames lettering guide, for example? How do you do balloon placement?

PWCW: Any other projects in the works?

NB: I have a ton of potential books I'd love to do. I'm trying to finish up this story called "Drop Ceiling" that I was serializing for many years in my comic Rubbernecker from Alternative Comics, and that's about halfway done. I think that'd make a nice book. And on the online site Activate, I'm doing the story of Ernest Shackleton's voyage to the Antarctic. He and 20 of his men got stuck for 16 months on an ice floe. The part of the story I'm doing right now is where they have to sail 800 miles due east to the South Georgia Islands whaling station, and if they miss that, it's next stop Africa, 3,000 miles away—and they're doing it in an 18-foot dinghy. I've been reading a lot of George Herriman's Krazy Kat, and I'm really trying to incorporate a lot of the older masters' techniques, becoming inspired by the history of comics. It's gonna be a great story when it's done.