Kuper Remembers Kuper
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on April 17, 2007 Sign up now!
-- Publishers Weekly, 4/17/2007
Peter Kuper has split time between being an in-demand illustrator, providing art for magazines such as the Nation and Time, and being one of the most vital alternative cartoonists working today. He cofounded the political comics anthology World War 3 Illustrated in 1979, creating a regular outlet for radical political cartoonists. He has created a number of well-received graphic novels, among them The Metamorphosis and Give it Up! and Other Stories. He is also one of the “Usual Gang of Idiots” at MAD magazine and creates new “Spy vs. Spy” strips. His forthcoming memoir, Stop Forgetting to Remember: The Autobiography of Walter Kurtz will be published by Crown in July. Using his comic book alter ego, Walter Kurtz, Kuper takes the reader on stroll back through his formative years, comparing his life today as a new father to his adolescence—when his biggest worries were scoring pot and losing his virginity—and to the footloose and reckless years that followed. Now a middle-class husband and father with a respectable career, Kurtz/Kuper can’t quite forget the younger man he used to be.
PW Comics Week: Stop Forgetting to Remember is a vibrant and visually dynamic book. Is the book’s visual intensity derived from the intensely personal nature of the stories?
Peter Kuper: I was trying to utilize all the [formal elements] unique to comics—panel shapes, ways to direct readers’ attention, dreams, fantasies, memories, the whole shebang—while telling the story of a decade of my life. Once the reality rules were bent, there was a world of possible ways to tell the story. When I wanted to express the feeling of heartbreak, shattering into a million pieces became a visual option. As a parent, the sensation of having a toddler rattle you like a toy was exactly how I remembered it. I just put visuals to the feeling that made the baby like King Kong. Showing my alter ego actually losing his head while thinking about George W. Bush was just taking advantage of the possibilities of this art form—and it showed how I feel on a regular basis when I realize Bush is the president!
PWCW: Why did you invent the alter ego of Walter Kurtz to tell the story instead of creating a straight autobiographical comic?
PK: Deniability. Also, making everyone a semifictional character gave me the freedom to deviate from reality when it helped the story. I think of it as being a straight auto-lie-ography
PWCW: During sequences that took place in the 1970s, stories of sex, drugs and music make the book feel a bit like an underground comic from that era. Are you taking a deliberate cue from underground comix?
PK: Well, underground comix were a huge influence in my teens, and that art naturally floated into my style for the sex and drug parts of the story. The same way [the influence of superhero comics great] Jack Kirby busts through every time I draw a fight scene. [Comics legend] Will Eisner lurks in my cityscapes and [early 20th-century cartoonist] Winsor McCay haunts my dream sequences.
PWCW: You've been working on this book for 13 years, and it’s gone through a number of permutations. In that time interest in comics has grown tremendously. What went into the prolonged production of this book?
PK: Having done comics for decades, I never figured on this timing. I’d be drawing comics whether they had wide acceptance or not. The big difference now is actually getting a major publisher behind it who can get the book into bookstores and in front of the audience I always aimed for.
Some of the material in the book first appeared in a book called Stripped, that came out ahead of this broader comics interest curve, so it was only seen by a small number of people before going out-of-print. HBO optioned Stripped for development as an animated show, and I spent a year and a half working with great animators, background artists and actors—before HBO decided to close down its animation department.
Then [actor/director] Forrest Whittaker optioned it, and I spent another year working with a director and animated it again, but that also died before getting on the air. I came out of it all quite depressed and set the material aside for a while. Still the story possibilities kept tapping on my shoulder over the years, and I hated to let so many ideas just sit in a drawer. Happily, I've worked on more than this book over the last 13 years, but there's work in there that dates back that far. I guess timing does come into play, since the current interest in graphic novels gave me the heart to put another solid couple of years into completing Stop Forgetting to Remember.
PWCW: There's a distinct color scheme in the book with brown-tinted pages representing sequences from your youth and gray tint representing your middle age. Why did you utilize this color scheme?
PK: I needed a device to separate time periods so the reader could see what was past and what was in the present—especially when [events] are taking place in the same panel! But I used the brown tint in all kinds of different ways. Sometimes the second color was a way to focus the reader's attention on a detail in a panel. Sometimes it was the delineation between what was reality and what my cartoonist character was drawing. The entire time/space continuum defined in two colors.
PWCW: You talk about Walter Kurtz fitting the profile for a cartoonist. Did the choice of his last name come from [legendary EC cartoonist and Mad magazine editor] Harvey Kurtzman and Jacob Kurtzberg, Jack Kirby's birth name?
PK: You are correct sir. And Walter from Walt Kelly, Walt Disney, Wally Wood, Walter Lance, Walt Simonson...
