Ivan Brunetti’s Idiosyncratic “Best-of”

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on October 24, 2006 Sign up now!

by Wil Moss, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 10/24/2006

You know comics are doing well when two book publishers can release collections of comics highlights and have so little overlap. While Houghton Mifflin’s The Best American Comics 2006 focuses on comics from the past year, Ivan Brunetti’s An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories covers, well, pretty much everything.

The creator of Schizo (the fourth issue of which just won an Ignatz for Outstanding Comic at the recent SPX) put aside his pen and paper for a while and embarked on a journey to put together an anthology for Yale University Press that gathers works from R. Crumb to Lynda Barry and everything in between. The criteria for inclusion was essentially his personal taste. The result is a terrific primer for people new to the medium, a textbook for teaching comics and a nice collection of all the greats in one place for the seasoned comics fan.

In a conversation with PWCW, Brunetti talked about the anthology, his personal history with comics and, in his typically gloomy manner, what he’s got coming up next—which may just be retirement.

PW Comics Week: Tell us about your history with comic books and comic strips. When did it turn from a hobby into something more? Not necessarily creating them, but studying and appreciating them?

Ivan Brunetti: Well, I've been interested in comics ever since I was a kid, before I could read, even. I drew a lot as a kid, mostly copying from comic books, but pretty much gave up on drawing around the time I was 12 (long story). I met some people [who were] into comics in college and that rekindled my interest in them. This was during the mid-to-late 1980s, and I was blown away by Maus, American Splendor and the Read Yourself Raw collection. These and others inspired me to try drawing again.

I guess I didn't really get serious about drawing comics and studying them more closely until the very end of college. At that point, I realized I had a long way to go. I decided I would spend however long it would take to teach myself how to make them. My work was highly unpolished and unfocused, so of course there was no hope for me of making any kind of living as an artist. I started working a day job to make a living and basically forced myself to draw on evenings and weekends. This has been, and still is, the way my life is set up. My desire to become a better artist necessarily led me down a path of learning as much as I could about the history and the mechanics of this art form.

In the last eight or nine years, I've also been lucky to become friends with many great cartoonists, and I'm deeply grateful to all of them for sharing so much information and ideas with me.

PWCW: How did you go about deciding what to include in a book with a topic this broad?

IB: As I explain in the introduction, ultimately these are highly personal choices. I would hope that in the last 10 years or so I have developed some taste or at least halfway-good judgment about the aesthetics of comics. The book reflects the way my mind works, I suppose. I'd like to think of it as a literary anthology, ultimately. It's aimed at the general literate reader out there; the book presupposes no prior knowledge of the medium. At the same time, it also serves as a handy compendium for those already familiar with this work. Hopefully there are still a few surprises in there, even for the more jaded comics fans.

PWCW: Did you learn or realize anything that surprised you while you were putting the book together, spending all that time with such works?

IB: Yes: I am never, ever editing an anthology again. In all seriousness, though, the sequence of the works is probably the aspect of the book I am most proud of, as far as my editorial skills (such as they are) are concerned. I started seeing surprising connections between artists and stories—sometimes thematic, sometimes visual—that were pleasing to me; I went with my instincts and tried to retain those connections when I put the book in its final order. The hardest part was limiting myself to only 400 pages; the book could have easily been 800 pages.

PWCW: What is the purpose of the book and who is its intended audience?

IB: I think the book is an argument in favor of the comics medium as a sophisticated literary (as well as visual) medium; thus, I hope anyone who enjoys good stories will find it compelling. I am also hoping it will be a feast for the eyes, to use a cliché, so that anyone interested in the visual arts, I hope, will find the great variety of styles and approaches interesting and satisfying. I also have a secret hope that educators can use the book as a primer on the art-comics movement, whether they are teaching the history of comics or a creative/studio-oriented class on creating comics. And, for the comics fans, I hope the book can be a sort of best-of compilation, albeit a highly idiosyncratic one.

PWCW: What are you working on now?

IB: My main project is not getting fired from my job (I work as a Web designer full-time at Columbia College Chicago), as health insurance is really important for me at the moment. So I think the distraction of these extracurricular comics projects will have to take a back burner indefinitely. A man's gotta eat, after all. Also, I have been teaching for a while, which is basically a second job, and that has been definitely taking its toll. Plus, I'm not sure if I've really been doing anyone any good. Probably not, because one of classes (at the University of Chicago) got canceled already, and most of the students in my current class (at Columbia College) probably dislike me anyway. From what I am told, my critiques are harsher than a lot of other teachers', although I am wearing kid gloves for the most part. Sigh.

Mostly, it would be nice to have a normal life: go to my job, come home at a decent hour, eat dinner, maybe read a book, and spend time with my wife and friends. The last few years have been nonstop work. I haven't had much time to do my own drawing, and I wonder if I'll really be able to get back into it after such a long break.

Having said that, I am going to attempt, at some point, to draw a one-page strip for the Kramers Ergot anthology. I will also try to write a small booklet on cartooning that will be included in the next issue of Comic Art magazine. Finally, at Fantagraphics' behest, I am organizing my old, out-of-print and rare work into a collection called Misery Loves Comedy. All of these projects will theoretically appear sometime in the next year or so, unless I slit my wrists first.

Supposedly, I am also working on the next issue of Schizo, my irregular comic book, and planning a long "graphic novel"—but I am such a chronic procrastinator that it is unlikely these two projects will ever get done. I think after the Misery Loves Comedy book I will most likely disappear off the face of the earth for an unspecified period of time. I'm tired, I'm getting old, my health is not so good, and I am completely burned out. For the most part, my work is done. I accomplished just about everything I wanted to accomplish, which wasn't much anyway: just proving to myself that I am okay and not a completely useless and horrible person. That has taken me 39 years. I'm frankly exhausted and finally free of any delusions that I have anything left to give.

Perhaps the Yale anthology will make a nice epitaph.

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