Paul's Paradoxes

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on January 30, 2007 Sign up now!

by Will Moss, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 1/30/2007

Paul Hornschemeier can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. For the past two years, when not doing freelance gigs to pay the bills, he has been working on the follow-up to his acclaimed graphic novel debut, Mother, Come Home. Entitled The Three Paradoxes, this new work is an intricate and ambitious autobiographical story that's due out in March from Fantagraphics.

Instead of serializing The Three Paradoxes, as he did with Mother, Come Home, Hornschemeier is releasing it as an original graphic novel, a decision that's mostly kept him off the comics scene for a while, and he's itching to get back in. Along with finishing Life with Mr. Dangerous (currently being serialized in Fantagraphic's anthology Mome, it will eventually be published by Ballantine Books), Hornschemeier will also relaunch his Forlorn Funnies comic book, a venue for his experimental works, a collection of which, Let Us Be Perfectly Clear, was published by Fantagraphics in late 2006.

In an interview with PWCW, the Chicago-based artist discusses The Three Paradoxes' creation, coloring Jonathan Lethem's revival of Omega the Unknown and re-embracing the thrill of publishing an idea as soon as it's put to paper.

PW Comics Week: What can you tell me about The Three Paradoxes?

Paul Hornschemeier: Admittedly, I avoid trying to summarize the book very often, because it's a little hard, but.

Put simply, it's an autobiographical comic. On a visit to my parents' house in rural southern Ohio, I, Present Reality Paul, went on a walk with my father, taking pictures along the way.

Put less simply, and more accurately, the story weaves in and out of five (seemingly) disparate narratives.

The book begins with a story inside the story: we're inside a cartoon that Present Reality Paul is trying to finish during the visit, called "Paul and the Magic Pencil" (a metaphorically autobiographical comic within the autobiographical frame of the book). Paul (of "Paul and the Magic Pencil") has been granted a magical implement, a pencil, and is trying to figure out what exactly it can do. He isn't coming up with much.

Then we zoom out of this story to the creator, Present Reality Paul, whose father is about to go on the aforementioned walk. Gladly abandoning the stymied cartoon temporarily, Present Reality Paul leaves with his camera, in order to fulfill a promise to a girl (with whose words and pictures he is falling in love, and with whom, six days from the time of this walk, he will be meeting for the first time) that he would take pictures of the places that affected him as a child.

As the walk with his father begins, and Present Reality Paul starts to record the places of his childhood, the book steps forward and backward through time, mainly revolving around the events of a summer day in Past Reality Paul's fifth-grade life. Amid these temporal bounces, we are taken to a convenience store clerk's formative story, to a car engulfed in flame, the time of Zeno and the pre-Socratic philosophers. And with each step, Present Reality Paul is trying to figure out how he will end his story ("Paul and the Magic Pencil"). And trying to make sense of the girl he sees as an ideal, but ultimately knows very little about.

Each story is drawn in a different style, with different production methods, to the point where some of the pages have more than one narrative arc (and thus more than one art and production style)s. But hopefully it all works together to give one feeling, one tied-together experience.

So, you can see why I generally avoid summarizing the thing when people ask, "What's it about?" I usually just say something like, "It's sort of weird. But hopefully not completely depressing."

PWCW: The book was announced quite a while ago. Why the long wait for its release?

PH: The Three Paradoxes has become, for me, an almost smothering case of life imitating art imitating life, etc., ad nauseam. For two years I have been drawing and writing a book about myself drawing and writing a book that I cannot finish, a book I cannot seem to end, and I couldn't end the book about the book with no end. Though, maddeningly, in the book within the book, I am suffering from a conceptual block—writer's block of sorts—while in reality it was closer to a LIVING block.

I made the colossal mistake of simultaneously quitting my day job, taking on writing and drawing The Three Paradoxes and contributing regularly to Mome. Which is all well and good, but as it turns out, I have to pay my bills and rent, and though you'd think an independent cartoonist would make absolute mountains of revenue from his two and a half readers, it turns out this isn't quite the case. So it's off to the freelance mines. And if we're being entirely honest, my humbling and globe-spanning pining for the elusively ideal woman hasn't been kind to my schedule either.

PWCW: What's the status of your involvement as colorist of novelist Jonathan Lethem's forthcoming comics serial, Omega the Unknown? What has that been like, working not only with people like Lethem and your friend Farel Dalrymple, the artist on the project, but also with Marvel Comics?

PH: Working with Jonathan and Farel has been, as expected, like being at an amusement park with no lines. I could read Jonathan's writing all day and look at Farel's drawings (especially his watercolors, which I encourage people to seek out) any time. As far as working for Marvel, they've been great and very lenient with my schedule. Our editor and assistant editor there have been quite good, and I think they've had the presence of mind to just let people do what they're good at.

PWCW: You published The Three Paradoxes as an original graphic novel, and you have other venues to run shorter works. Does the publication of Let Us Be Perfectly Clear mark the end of Forlorn Funnies?

PH: If you had asked me this about two years ago, I might have said, "Yes, that's the end of me doing pamphlet comics!" Publishers were pounding into my head that pamphlets are dead. "It's all about the book market!" And I think there's an obvious validity to that logic.

But now I've adamantly swung in the opposite direction. Working on The Three Paradoxes has assured me that I loathe working that way (doing a book all in one shot), with no output of my own (because I can't really consider Mome my own, it being an anthology) for a year or two years. I want to be able to test ideas, or to just do a single page experiment or gag here or there. Having no outlet for that is simply depressing. I want to play: books carry a finality and seriousness to them that I don't feel in pamphlet comics.

And there's just a sense of excitement in getting the ideas out there, seeing things in print. I don't think I'll ever outgrow that. I've already talked with Fantagraphics about publishing the second volume of the Forlorn Funnies series, so everyone will be seeing that in the near future. Frankly, it can't happen soon enough for me. I've got so many ideas piling up, they need to get out of my apartment. They're such horrible roommates.

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