A conversation with artist Tim Lane

Artist Tim Lane made St. Louis his adopted home after a lengthy career in New York; his prolific output includes illustrations for several prominent publications, the self-published comic, Happy Hour In America and the critically heralded graphic novels, Abandoned Cars and The Lonesome Go. A co-conspirator with The Mound City Tattler, Lane also teaches at The Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University.

A taster of Lane’s next book is being offered in a new exhibition, Just Like Steve McQueen: The Graphic Novel In Progress, currently on display at Meshuggah Café (6269 Delmar Boulevard) through August.

He talked to us about his prodigious new project, St. Louis’ creativity, and his passion for McQueen, who grew up in Slater, Missouri and spent time in town filming The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery.

When is your new graphic novel, Just Like Steve McQueen coming out?

Fantagraphics is shooting for 2018, but I honestly don’t see it being done for another three years. It’s going to be the biggest project I’ve ever done.

Describe what your new book, Just Like Steve McQueen, is about.

It’s a collection of short stories told in a chronological way. The book opens in 1975, a year of disillusionment for Steve McQueen, where he sort of vanished from the Hollywood scene. He had accomplished everything that he wanted to accomplish and as trite as it sounds, to him what that meant is besting his competitor Paul Newman as the top billing in The Towering Inferno. In his mind, it was the pinnacle of his career in terms of his celebrity. Then the book goes back to various periods in his life with each story told by different narrators. This is not meant to be a straight biography; it’s an interpretive one, where, in some cases, I am telling stories that are purely metaphorical.

See also: Scratching the Underbelly: Tim Lane’s “The Lonesome Go”

Because McQueen was larger than life, how did you approach translating his life visually?

I’m playing around with truth opposed to myth and rumor. I also am playing with the genre of comics, and how a story may be told. For example, the story Rebel Comics is set when McQueen was living in Greenwich Village. There, I’m attempting to tell his story as if it were a 1950s pre-code comic. In other cases the artwork will be more in the vein of 1930s cartoons. Overall I am using a variety of aesthetics to relate to McQueen as an individual, which is not the easiest thing to do.

What is it about Steve McQueen that appeals to you as a subject matter?

Encapsulated in the story of Steve McQueen are a lot of very American ideas. He made himself out of nothing. He was a juvenile delinquent. His mother abandoned him, and he never met his father. He literally willed himself to where he became. McQueen was this kid who was born in Indiana and grew up in Slater, Missouri with nothing going for him who turned out to be a star on his own terms. He also was anti-intellectual and all instinct.

See Also: Taking Flight With Bumbershoot Aerial Arts

You made the decision to move to St. Louis to further your career; what are your thoughts on the city as a creative hub?

I have had the unique experience of living in New York and San Francisco and never have I lived in a city so ripe with creatives. The poet David Clewell has been a huge inspiration on how to write this McQueen book. He wrote a poem called Jack Ruby’s America that was exactly what I wanted in the book. I have been here for 12 years now, and I moved from New York because I knew if I wanted to take my comics seriously I had to get out of that city. I was freelancing all the time to keep my head above water, and had a friend who lived in Soulard, so I knew this was a place to go and live inexpensively and have an environment suitable for me to get my work done. I know it sounds mystical, but there is a creative magic to the city, one where I feel like I am living in a dream Tom Waits is having. It is a very conducive place that I wish would get more attention.