Gotham City and Metropolis can keep their clichés—St. Louis is flying high in the edgy world of alternative comics
By Cliff Froehlich
Collaborative illustration by—and featuring—Kevin Huizenga, Dan Zettwoch, Ted May and Sacha Mardou
Long derided as the cellar dweller of the arts, comics are ascending on the cultural express elevator with heart-stopping speed. Tastemakers both high and low, from museum curators to movie directors, have stamped their imprimaturs on graphic literature, and out here in the heartland, a burgeoning crop of alternative (i.e., not superhero and not fantasy) cartoonists has sprouted up inSt. Louis—most prominently the trio of Kevin Huizenga, Dan Zettwoch and Ted May. And with the 2005 arrival of May’s British wife, Sacha Mardou, an established illustrator herself, St. Louis has even begun importing cartoonists from overseas.
The scene’s decade-long growth can be attributed partially to the presence of the alternative-friendly, diversely stocked comics shop Star Clipper and to supportive cartoon-savvy art teachers such as Douglas Dowd and Tom Huck at Washington University and Dan Younger at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. But no factor is of greater importance than Xplane, the “visual thinking company” founded in 1993 by Dave Gray. Xplane specializes in explaining ideas and processes in visual terms.
“It’s become the nexus of comics activity in St. Louis,” says May, who works full-time for the information-graphics firm. “Almost anybody who’s a cartoonist in St. Louis has gone through Xplane.” The roster of alums includes Star Clipper co-owner A.J. Trujillo and such comics artists as Jeff Wilson, Jason Robards, Andrew Robbins and Anchovy (Anthony) Sciarrino.
May Day
Xplane was the physical site at which many of St. Louis’ key alternative cartoonists eventually gathered, but they had already exchanged e-mails or were familiar with one another’s work, thanks to the insular world of minicomics—self-published books, usually printed in small runs at a photocopying shop, folded and stapled by hand and distributed in person or through the mail.
The 37-year-old May, a native St. Louisan, was perhaps the most precocious of the future minicomics cartoonists. “I’ve pretty much done comics since I could hold a pencil,” he recalls. “I would draw these one-pagers or three-pagers and sell them to my sister and brother and mom for a nickel apiece.”
At the University of Kansas in Lawrence in the early ’90s, May professionalized, if only slightly, by creating his first minicomics. One such mini, Tru-Value, was a surrealistic grab bag. “I’d be in class, and I’d be writing little scripts and doodles in the margins,” he says. “Whatever I would draw in my notebook would go into the comic. At some point I threw in Dante’s Inferno, because that’s what I was reading in my Western Civ. class. So I had this whole sequence where they went into hell, and instead of the devil being there, it was Bert from Sesame Street.”
When May moved back to St. Louis after graduation in the mid-’90s, he set up a studio in—yes—his parents’ West County basement. There, he began creating new work: genre stories that he then subverted with his trademark gags. “I can’t not write a funny comic, for some reason,” he explains sheepishly. He landed a job at Arcade Printing—devising plots while cutting acetate film—but also concocted grander plans: “I wanted to be a comics activist.”
His dream was to publish a free newsprint comics anthology supported by advertising and featuring local cartoonists. The venture stalled early on, but May’s efforts weren’t wasted. A flyer he’d posted in Vintage Vinyl drew the attention of fellow cartoonists Andrew Robbins, Jeff Wilson and Jerome Gaynor, helping establish not only several long-term relationships but also, when Robbins steered May to Xplane, a career.
Although May gives due credit to Xplane—“It was as close to comics as I could get and have a regular job”—that full-time work has kept his comics output low: contributions to several anthologies, including the three-issue run of the all-Xplane Impossible, and such minis as Neruda, It Lives and It Lives Preview.
However short in supply, May’s comics are long on laughs. Although nominally tighter in their plot structure than the id explosions of his college minis, the lunatic tales still feature outlandish characters—space aliens, mentally dense superheroes, diabolical scientists—and raucous fight scenes. The loose artwork vibrates with energy, and the narratives move at breakneck velocity, often jump-cutting with Godardian abandon before lurching to abrupt and quizzical stops. He admits cheerfully, “A lot of my stories don’t even have conclusions.”
‘Toonsmiths
A select guide to other contributors, past and present, to the St. Louis comics scene
St. Louis’ current graphic-lit prominence and plenitude of comics artists shouldn’t entirely surprise, given the city’s long association with cartooning:
- Post-Dispatch founder Joseph Pulitzer helped pioneer the Sunday-newspaper comics supplement (albeit in New York City).
- The hometown daily has employed several distinguished editorial cartoonists, including masters of the form Daniel Fitzpatrick and Bill Mauldin.
- Influential Marvel and DC comic-book writers Dennis O’Neil and Steve Gerber both grew up in St. Louis, and their fellow writer/editor Roy Thomas lived here for a time.
- Former Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville art professor John Adkins Richardson both dabbled in comics (specializing in sword-and-sorcery material) and wrote a book, The Complete Book of Cartooning, on the subject.
- Stretching the geographical boundaries, seminal underground artist Frank Stack (a.k.a. Foolbert Sturgeon) is an emeritus professor of art at the University of Missouri–Columbia.
- Mad contributor and all-around cartooning maven Bob Staake spent nearly two decades in town, contributing to the defunct humor newspaper Snicker before moving on to such lesser publications as The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal.
- St. Louisan John Blair Moore wrote and drew the comic-book series Invaders From Home in the early ’90s for DC Comics’ alternative imprint, Piranha Press.
- Tom Galambos, artist of the well-regarded 2000 graphic novella All the Wrong Places, attended Washington University.
- Native son and current resident Todd Hignite edits the extraordinary critical journal Comic Art, writes erudite books on the subject (the Yale-published In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists) and curates comics-related exhibits (e.g., the Robert Crumb show now at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts).
- Peter Coogan, a writing specialist at Fontbonne University, authored Superhero, which explores the “secret origin” of comics’ most familiar and dominant genre.
- An impressive array of hometown creators currently work in more mainstream genres, including Matt Kindt (Pistolwhip, Super Spy), writer Cullen Bunn and artists Brian Hurtt (The Damned) and Chris Samnee (Capote in Kansas).
Source of the Ganges
Ted May could be forgiven if he looked at his friend Kevin Huizenga with a twinge of envy: Acclaimed alternative-comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly recently released Curses, a collection of Huizenga’s earlier comics, and he has two ongoing solo titles, Ganges and Or Else. But it’s not just the quantity of his work that’s attracting national acclaim—it’s the quality. “Kevin Huizenga is one of comics’ most genuine and interesting talents,” writes critic and minicomics expert Tom Spurgeon, in his online Comics Reporter. “He stands as good a chance as anyone working today of being the next alternative comics superstar.”
Huizenga, 30, grew up in South Holland, Ill., a southern suburb of Chicago that he describes as “a Dutch immigrant community of onion farmers.” Like May, Huizenga was originally a superhero geek. When he was 12 or so, Huizenga had his first comics epiphany: “In my explorations of my neighborhood, I found this rack of comic books at the local drugstore. On a whim, I bought a Captain America comic book, and when I got home and read it, it really seized my imagination. That night I started to try to draw the characters in the comic book.
“At first I was just a fanboy of these superhero comics, and I was just drawing the characters, but later I ended up trying to tell my own stories. That was an exciting, addictive rush, to make up a story, to draw your characters in a series of panels. I never stopped after that.”
Huizenga published his first mini with friends in high school, when his tastes began to evolve. Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library had just started coming out. Huizenga was also influenced by two self-published minicomics: John Porcellino’s King-Cat and Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve. “They were telling short, literary-seeming stories about real life, real people,” he says.
Huizenga continued publishing his Supermonster minicomic series at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., and graduated in 1999. While working for a yarn distributor’s catalog—“taking digital photographs of yarn, scanning yarn”—he struck up an e-mail correspondence with May, who got in touch with him because a mutual friend recommended his minis. That relationship eventually led Huizenga to extricate himself from his entanglement with yarn and move on to St. Louis and Xplane.
By the time Huizenga moved to town in 2000, Supermonster, which ran 14 issues, had already started attracting attention and accolades. Zettwoch had encountered Huizenga’s work through Wash. U. art professor Douglas Dowd, and Spurgeon, in his Comics Journal column on minis, had named Huizenga his 2001 “Minimalism Cartoonist of the Year” (an honor bestowed on Ted May the following year).
In late 2003, Huizenga made the leap from minis to major publisher with a featured spot in the debut issue of Drawn & Quarterly Showcase. His profile has only increased since, and he’s now routinely—and favorably—compared with the field’s most accomplished artists, including his cartoon-god inspiration, Chris Ware.
Huizenga also continues to produce occasional minicomics (Untitled, Sermons No. 1), but the process of photocopying, assembling and mailing out the books isn’t something he looks on fondly. “I hate that,” he admits. “I’m just interested in making up my own stories and drawing the pages, and hopefully everything else can be taken care of by someone else.”
Huizenga left Xplane in 2001 for a job at the Saint Louis Science Center, but for nearly two years now he’s devoted himself exclusively to his comics work. He’s quick to point out that his wife, Katie, a librarian at the St. Louis Public Library’s main facility, enables that freedom: “To be honest, the only reason I’m able to do it full time is because I’m married and my wife works. It doesn’t bring in enough money for me to do it full time, so my success is kind of an illusion.”
His artistic success, however, is undeniable. His ambitious, sharply observed stories—which often appear in “suites,” with individual tales woven skillfully together into a larger narrative—have a unique literary depth and formal complexity. Unlike the stereotypical mainstream comic book, with its outsized characters and pell-mell action, Huizenga’s comics frequently deal in the quotidian—the first issue of Ganges revolves around a walk to the library by Glenn Ganges, his continuing character and alter ego. “My life experiences are pretty limited,” Huizenga says, “and I can only really write about what I know, which is domestic day-to-day living in the suburbs. I’m not going to write about life on a submarine.”
Go “Redbird”!
Falling somewhere between Huizenga’s contemplative dramas and May’s anarchic comedies, Dan Zettwoch’s work takes an almost journalistic approach to storytelling. Although biography is often the germ of the story, it’s then fictionalized, with the scope vastly expanded through the accretion of detail. Zettwoch also shares Huizenga’s interest in the formal properties of comics. “I love the idea of maps and diagrams and of unfolding a comics page,” Zettwoch says. “Rather than reading it from the top left panel to the bottom right, I like the idea of having to trace your way through a page, read it more likea maze.”
Huizenga cites Zettwoch’s “The Ghost of Dragon Canoe,” in the fifth volume of alternative-comics standard-bearer Kramers Ergot, as representative of his strengths: “He’s filled that story with so many diagrams and cutaways that are unnecessary to the story, and to me that’s what’s so beautiful about Dan’s work. They function like descriptive text would in prose: You start to get a visual sense of the world of the story just from all these diagrams and cutaways. That’s unique to comics.”
Zettwoch, 30, wasn’t actually much of a traditional comics fan during his youth in Louisville, Ky. He loved to draw, but his tastes ran toward Mad magazine rather than superheroes. His “gateway alternative comic” was the superhero parody The Tick.
Zettwoch drew a four-panel gag strip for his high-school paper, but his interest in comics didn’t fully blossom until his move to St. Louis for art school at Wash. U. “At some point along the way I discovered Eightball, by Dan Clowes, and Acme Novelty Library, by Chris Ware, and that’s when I got really into comics,” he says.
While still in school, Zettwoch drew an anecdotal/autobiographical strip for the campus newspaper, Student Life, which he collected into his first mini, Running With Scissors. For his thesis project, he upped the aesthetic ante, producing The Angel & Escapist, a 32-page comic of acrylic paintings and linoleum cuts that he describes as “unpublishable” because of the production challenges created by his use of nontraditional materials.
The subject of that comic, the 1962 championship bout between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, hinted at the future direction of Zettwoch’s comics work: reality-based material informed by research. His first mini of original material, Collectin’, was a semiautobiographical story about an encounter with an obsessive collector of discarded junk, and his most recent comics similarly meld fictional and nonfictional elements. That’s not to say the stories are dryly factual: Zettwoch’s cartooning is tighter than May’s, but displays a similar zest and penchant for comic exaggeration.
Like Huizenga, Zettwoch has left Xplane. He continues to freelance for the company and earns his living as an illustrator, and he’s now being published by some of the best outlets in the field: He was a featured artist in the fourth issue of Drawn & Quarterly Showcase, and more exciting still, Buenaventura Press is scheduled to publish a four-issue series of Redbird, his former minicomic.
Despite his growing reputation, Zettwoch has not abandoned minis; he has a love for the mini as art object. “For Kevin, it was more just getting the work out there,” he says, “but I was into making handmade objects.” Certainly anyone who owns a copy of Ironclad, Zettwoch’s epic mini about the Civil War naval battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack, will appreciate his devotion to the form. Ironclad—which sold about 2,000 copies, “printed in batches of 100, 200, 250 at a time over the past four or five years”—is astonishingly lavish, with silkscreened covers and gatefolds, all lovingly cut and bound by hand.
“To this day,” says Zettwoch, “there’s something satisfying about finishing a comic, going and photocopying it and having it the next day to give away to your friends or sell at Star Clipper—much more so than sending off a big batch of digital files to Drawn & Quarterly and having to wait six months for the book to come out. Of course, it’s nice not to have to fold and staple every copy.”
Down the Manhole
For Sacha Mardou, self-publishing is a matter not of choice but of necessity. Because she came to comics relatively late, not making a concerted effort to produce them until after graduating from university, Mardou continues to refine her drawing skills whenever she’s not working as a librarian at the Kingshighway branch of the St. Louis Public Library.
“I’m focusing on my craft,” she says. “I don’t think I’m really ready for a publisher yet, so it’s something I’m not concerned about. I’m quite happy to keep putting things out. I didn’t used to be. I used to think, ‘Why do they keep ignoring me?’ But there was a good reason. In the British small press, I was a bit of a big fish in a small pond, but here I’m completely unknown, which is great. I can start again.”
Mardou, 30, grew up in Manchester, England, reading the “kind of stupid stuff available at the news agent back then, girls’ romance comics,” but it wasn’t until she discovered work such as Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s Love & Rockets and Clowes’ Eightball that her interest in cartooning deepened. “I think I’m representative of a big readership out there, especially women, who had never been interested in superhero comics and grew up with comics not being for them,” she says, “and all of a sudden there’s an explosion of writers and artists who are doing this personal, grown-up work.”
Although she’d always been interested in art, Mardou says, “I never knew what to draw. I was just drawing girls in fashionable clothes. Now I can make comics about girls in fashionable clothes.” That charmingly self-deprecating description doesn’t do Mardou’s work justice. Although capable of amusing entertainments—like a cheeky fantasy about saving the Billy Liar–era Tom Courtenay from a future life of Dickensian adaptations—her comics generally traffic in fictionalized autobiography that she accurately characterizes as “slice-of-life, kind of literary.”
Since setting to work on comics, Mardou has self-published 10 books, including the anthology title Whores of Mensa and her solo Manhole. Although she initially distributed her work through local comics shops, Mardou eventually discovered a vast network of like-minded fans of comics linked by the Internet. One such fan was Ted May. Their e-mail correspondence evolved into a transatlantic romance when May flew to London on Xplane business and they met in person. After visiting St. Louis in May 2005, Mardou went home and applied for a visa. “Ted came to London again for his work in August, and in September 2005 I came here,” she says. “I’ve been here ever since.”
Mardou’s transition to Midwestern life was eased by St. Louis’ community of comics artists—an aspect of the city with which she was familiar even before meeting May. “I knew about St. Louis as a kind of mecca for young comic cartoonists,” she says. “I read a Comics Journal issue about young cartoonists, and it had a focus on people from St. Louis like Kevin and Dan, and they both talked about Ted. I didn’t know what St. Louis was, but I’d heard of it in terms of comics.”
Mardou is not alone in recognizing the city’s centrality in the world of alternative cartooning. Other comics pilgrims are certain to join her in the coming years, journeying to St. Louis to add their voices to the lively panel discussion started by May, Huizenga and Zettwoch.
