Jensen Looks at the Personal Side of America

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on January 23, 2007 Sign up now!

by Ian Brill, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 1/23/2007

After losing his job, ending a relationship, getting evicted from his apartment and facing the death of his grandmother and September 11, cartoonist K. Thor Jensen decided a little time spent on the road would do him good. He took a Greyhound bus tour of the United States, staying with many people he had only known through the Internet. Red Eye, Black Eye, from Alternative Comics, is Jensen's 300-page memoir of his trip and one of the first important graphic novels of 2007. Jensen's depiction of reality is stark. It's a collection of small moments, of funny anecdotes over beer and nights out with friends. With that focus, Jensen illustrates the side of humanity often missed by works of art with grander scopes.

PWCW: Red Eye, Black Eye starts with the enormity of September 11, but after that it's a narrative that values the small interactions between people. Many of the pages are devoted to the stories other people told you along your trip. Why did you avoid the overtly political and sociological and instead devote time to the little things in life?

K. Thor Jensen: I think that after September 11, most people I know were overcome by a very pronounced feeling of helplessness and inability to affect matters on a global level—we all felt very small and alone. Red Eye, Black Eye is in many ways about recognizing that loneliness, that sense of uselessness in the face of the "big story" and instead of letting it dominate you, realizing that you have your own story at your own scale, and whether it be trivial or world shattering, you should take the time to tell it. By recording the stories people told me as I traveled, I tried to take a portrait of what it's like to live in America, what people care about, deal with and think is funny.

PWCW: The art is based on the six panel grid, and every panel really matters. Each illustrates a significant action so one or two pages can cover one story. Does this come out of your experience creating minicomics?

KTJ: Oh, I'm so sick of the six-panel grid by now. I'm still exceptionally glad I did it for RE, BE, though—I wanted the book to have as low a barrier of entry to the casual noncomics reader as possible. I wanted everything to flow clearly and smoothly, with little to no wasted space except to create atmosphere. I wanted the book to move along at a steady clip—to cover 60 days and 10,000 miles in 300 pages is no easy feat, especially when they're pretty eventful days and miles. I'm not sure if my involvement in minicomics has anything to do with it—comics are comics, whether they're photocopied, offset printed or posted on the Web. The tools are the same. But I'd be lying if I said that the work of minicomics pioneers like John Porcellino wasn't a major influence on my work.

PWCW: Why is it important that this book is so accessible to a general audience?

KTJ: Well, marketing to the niche that is the indie comics audience is kind of a bad way to do business. Obviously, I'd love for comics readers to read my comic. That's a given. But I'd also really like people who like Kerouac's On the Road or Steinbeck's Travels with Charley or who read travel magazines or watch the Discovery Channel or who have ever taken a long, stupid bus ride to be able to pick up my book and, without any significant barriers to entry, get right into it. Don't get me wrong—I love formally inventive, expressionistic, difficult comics. I could write for hours about how great I think a guy like Warren Craghead [an experimentalist comics and gallery artist] is. But for this book, that's not the approach I thought would yield the best results for the reader.

PWCW: The book was serialized on serializer.net before it was completed. Did that affect the final product, perhaps in the feedback you got?

KTJ: Serializer was great for me. Having a regular weekly deadline not only kept me on schedule (look how fast my productivity slipped after the site went down [in 2005])but also inspired me to keep every little piece of the book fun, interesting and understandable to a new reader. That attitude translated to the book as a whole, helping me define the pace and narrative tone. I took a lot of feedback from readers and after Alternative picked the book up, made changes to over 120 of the book's pages, tightening the narrative, fixing weird dialogue, et cetera. It was very useful to have that Web audience, and hopefully it will carry over to the print edition.

PWCW: You seem to have developed a devil-may-care attitude on your trip. Was that something that came out because of this experience or was that always there?

KTJ: Well, once your whole life falls apart on you, you sort of have a problem with giving a damn about anything for a while. I'm still embarrassed about cussing in front of my mom, though.

PWCW: You go all over the country but seem to always stay with young, college-age types. What did you notice in terms of big differences and similarities of the cultural type between all the places you stayed at?

KTJ: It's only natural that I would gravitate to my general peers in age (late 20-somethings and early 30-somethings) and education (despite being a high school dropout). I think that everybody, everywhere has the same general desires: find love, find safety, find contentment. And a combination of all three of those things is hard to find. Obviously, I'm the negative factor—during the time the book covers, I don't have any of the three. And as I encounter people, I think we kind of come back to these topics—looking for those three things, in a number of different ways.

PWCW: When writing the book, did you feel that the order of real events created some kind of dramatic mold? For example, the elusive $1,000 check from your landlord creates this line of anticipation throughout.

KTJ: Well, that's the principal challenge of autobiography—cohering the individually pointless events of a person's life into a compelling narrative thread. Obviously, things are selectively left out to give emphasis to the through-line narratives. I was lucky enough to have some recurring themes in the events I experienced and hopefully worked hard enough to make those themes apparent to the reader. It's a challenge, and I don't think I'll be doing any more autobiographical work for some time—although both of the projects I'm working on now are biographical, so maybe I didn't learn a lesson after all.

PWCW: What are the new projects you are working on?

KTJ: My next major graphic novel project will be one of two proposals I've sent to my agent—whichever he sells first is the one that I draw first. One, Downbeat the Ruler, is a tangled historical semifiction revolving around the 1976 assassination attempt of Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica—narrated by a corpse, the story weaves through politics, music, religion and crime as we try to dig to the core of an event that is still unexplained. I've done massive amounts of research and am painstakingly building as tight and intricate a narrative as I can. It's a truly fascinating subject and one that I think will make an amazing book.

The other project, Red Diaper Baby, co-written with my wife, tells the story of her growing up as the daughter of two of the leading members of the Revolutionary Communist Party in the rural South. From labor strikes and May Day marches to Klan rallies and arson, her story is one of the most gripping, strange and unbelievable ones I've ever heard. We've been doing many interviews with her parents' friends and Party members from the period and it's coming together nicely.

And, of course, I'll probably show up in a couple dozen anthologies, minicomics, inexplicable art books, gallery shows, YouTube videos ad infinitum.