Misery Does Love Comedy

This week I had the opportunity to interview Ivan Brunetti, a master cartoonist best known for his depressive self-loathing or "self-lacerating" laments, appearing as long existential treatises within gorgeously inked frames. I discovered his book Misery Loves Comedy (Fantagraphics Books, 2007) the last time I popped into Casablanca Comics in Portland Maine and asked for the most emotionally dark work of comic art they could think of. I walked out with Ivan Brunetti's book, which pulls together his comics Schizo numbers one through three, "horrifying early work," and contributions to periodicals.

And dark it was. Self-mutilation, death, rape, suicide, violence, blood, scatology, coarse language, misanthropy and bleak view of life in general all taken together and at face value does not sound at all like an appealing read, let alone one bearing even the tiniest shred of psychological value.

So why, then, did I enjoy looking at this?

Could it be because I am a sick person hiding beneath the mask of a sage psychiatrist who spends his weekdays strategically positioned on the "sane" side of a consulting room? No, that would be far too simple and simple-minded an explanation, not to mention I really am mentally healthy! And that would totally miss the creativity and insight the artist brings to bear with his pen and paper, a fearless if neurotic and obsessive working through of intense despair. Although some of the violent images were hard to bear, and the course language seemed a bit much at times, Ivan Brunetti is clever and funny as hell and his avatar, an appealingly hideous bearded man, takes us through some truly profound thoughts, an "ecstatic lucidity that, ironically, only comes in my darkest moments."

In one series the character moves through a string of unflattering actions: straining naked on the toilet; squeezing a pimple on his paisley-shaped nose which we see in a kind of magnified close-up over nine panels; lying anergically under the covers as his wife entreats him to get out of bed; philosophizing about suicide while applying deodorant; getting dressed as he argues with an irreverent Jesus. Cartooning as an art form does not necessarily spring to mind for most people when imagining fine art, profound emotion or the philosophical or existential. But this prejudice I am convinced comes out of blind habit, which fails to consider the raw power embedded within an intrinsically unpretentious, and often shockingly direct form of expression. I was curious to see whether this kind of art was helpful in some way to the artist, or to those who read it.

More recently Mr. Brunetti edited the two-volume An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True Stories (Yale University Press, 2006 and 2008) and his latest incarnation of Schizo, number four, won the 2006 Ignatz award for Outstanding Comic of the Year. He is on the faculty of Columbia College Chicago. What follows is my conversation with Mr. Brunetti on December 1st, 2010.

Jeremy Spiegel: What was going on for you at the time you were creating what became the content of Misery Loves Comedy?

Ivan Brunetti: It was a painful time period. I wanted to get as much on paper as I could. I could never do that again as I had then. Those comics that come out of 1993-1998 and the drawings document that five or six year period of my life. I can't say now I'm problem free. Now life is not so bad, I'm not as angry a person, I'm dealing with my issues, and seen various psychiatrists and therapists since then. My drawings look a lot differently now. I drew the cover for The New Yorker magazine, books, and Schizo the fourth issue came out five years ago. Now I'm still kind of depressed but not as angry, but I'm no longer on any medications for depression.

JS: There are some who might say this guy's depressed so the depression is at work here and somehow deny you the creator of the full credit you deserve for realizing these masterpieces. Would these works be different if you were in different mood states while you made them? Or is that just a naive way of thinking about how this is created?

IB:

To say depression created the art is false. It is an act of will, the illness does not cause the art. To make art it is an act of will to fight demons that I'm battling at the time. The depression is not creating anything. It did, though, give me a different perspective. The depression is not a spur to action. It takes a lot of willpower to get through depression to draw or to get creative and it doesn't help to create anything. Although yes, you are maybe more of an observer of life, it depends on what kind of depression you have. It is so debilitating. If you step outside of enough to see what is going on-you need to step outside of the depression, outside of yourself to see. Depression will swallow it all up and so by itself I am not a conduit for the depression to create art. The person has to do it.

IB:

JS:

In principle as an artist one can say that you have a certain amount of freedom that the rest of us don't and so therefore can express the inexpressible regardless of its content. Id, the shadow self, violence, fear, what we may keep hidden an artist can bring more readily out into the open. But what you bring out into the open-and some of it is really delightfully twisted-seems that has universality, not that most people would readily admit to it. This is why I think the work is remarkable. My role in my profession shapes or can shape-prescribes and proscribes-I might write or say, without say, losing my license or my credibility.

JS:

IB: A lot of effort is expended to make sense of what you're going through. Part of the period of time I was manic and then did help me get things done as the anger was fueling me. The work was not consciously planned out. I was just trying in the moment to be honest about what I was experiencing, and trying to have a sense of humor about it.

JS: As you write where does the audience come into play? Are you thinking of them and who are they?

IB: I did not have an audience in mind. In my mind twenty-five people were looking at it-they were my friends. I just felt like making some comics. I never imagined they would get beyond the few people I knew. It was a different world back then. It was a small community of then self-published ‘zines, which have since been replaced by blogs. Twenty years ago you really had to work to find other weirdos. I'd meet a few people and thought I'd Xerox a few copies to a few cartoonists I'd corresponded with. I found a publisher years later who called out of nowhere and I came up with new material for the first issue of Schizo. It was not planned out in advance. Now there was this audience of other people, who read underground comics, but even that freaked me out. People reading it and sending me letters-three thousand people-it was all unexpected. There's about six thousand copies [of Misery Loves Company]. The disturbing images are easily taken at face value. In the work I could wring the last few drops out of my id. I don't want [the book] to have a large distribution.

JS: You described how life has improved since Misery Loves Comedy and you're less depressed and less angry, so I wonder if a kind of working through occurred in the process of creating? And are you aware of a healing benefit for any readers of the book?

IB: People told me it helped them I hear even now in the occasional email or letter. It helped them when they were going through a really depressing time or difficult time. I don't know what it did for them but people got something out of it. Maybe I'm delusional but maybe there's something useful about the work. But there are not a lot of people that would understand this material. This is not an easily analyzed work. I didn't know what was compelling me, but it was some kind of healing process. It was therapeutic for me to make it. Now I can't even look at it at all. I can ‘t ever judge it now. I can't separate the work from my experience at the time. And what I'm still going through. It was torturous and so it's hard to separate from that torturous feeling and look at it aesthetically.

JS: How about any bad reactions to this difficult work?

IB: Some of the audience had major problems with it. I was informed that I was communicating things that were not my intent. What I thought was empathizing with the victim in a gallows-type humor to retain the dignity of the victim was grossly misconstrued. The gallows humor was a weird way I felt of flipping the power back to the powerless. Sometimes I would get a negative response to the comics. They took it that I got a sort of sadistic glee from it. And maybe I wasn't aware of it, these reasons people were responding to it. Over the years I learned to communicate better what I'm trying to get across. I learned to control what I'm expressing more clearly, in a way that's potentially much less convoluted.

JS: Have you been successful?

IB: I can't say it's completely working. But I'm more aware of what I am communicating. What I do tend to be is autobiographical in the act of doing myself as a character. But in the process it all becomes fictional. It is a subjective interpretation in people's minds. By doing these stories that are autobiographically based most people cannot differentiate well me and my work. People might think that I'm advocating something when I'm not.

JS: It's irony, yes, and some of it is funny as hell.

IB:

Criticism tends to be of me as a person but not of the work. It's a fictionalized version of me and it's structured. Ultimately it's fictional based on emotional truth. It's a criticism of me as a horrible person, self-flagellating, because they see my drawn character. They are unable to see it as a character. Look at it as a manifesto. Comics are self-critical and self-lacerating and it makes it therefore problematic for people to judge it as it is. I wonder about doing more and then I wonder maybe I should not do it.

IB:

JS: You go on sometimes for pages and pages with a kind of rant. While much of it superficially might seem to come from a misanthropic antisocial maniac, one realizes how considered all of this is, philosophical, existential, and incredibly clever. I mean, there's a series of panels wherein your truly foul-looking avatar is wrenching on a pimple on the skin of his nose and you take us through each step in the process. And as we go we see a close up of the state of the pimple-extraction of pus, bleeding, healing of the large irritated pore. I don't think I've seen in comics such a truly hideous depiction of the natural history of a dermatological event. How does it occur to you to pair something like this with the text?

IB: The assumption is that artists know everything they are doing but truly that is rare. If they do then they're making art that's not so interesting. You ride the wave. You may not even understand it yourself. Only now can I step back and see it for what it is. Sometimes it takes a while to see it.

JS: For you, Ivan, what's been compelling about comics as an art form?

IB: What attracted me to comics was that it was a very marginalized thing. I learned to read and draw even before I started school. I wanted to figure comics out and I've always has an intuitive affinity for it. I don't know how someone could get into them without having a connection to them early as a kid. There is something immediate about their being printed versus fine art. There are many copies out there so you don't have to go to a gallery. You put them out there and you don't know who will find them. I don't like meeting people and so the comics are an ambassador. It took the place of me having to meet people. I could give part of myself, someone with the book would know me and that aspect I think is good.

JS:

In general are comics evolving, maturing?

JS:

IB: Comics are taken a little more seriously now as they are so much under the radar. No one cared about them before. Cartoonists could invent their own rules. They were idiosyncratic. Now comics are cool. If I was twenty years old now, I might be put off by some aspects of them. They were attractive to me because they tied me into a community that had a more interesting outlook on life than most people did. It was way of expressing in earnest. Now if you step back and judge them aesthetically, more and more talented people are into comics. They're inventing their own rules, and the bar is definitely raised now. You can't go back now to the way it was yet still some aspects of them are the same. It's not a direct way of creating like splattering paint. You must have structure there-structural activity in tension. You straddle the Apollonian and the Dionysian. There is an organic ineffable spark to them the way an artist performs. Comics document thinking by writing and drawing both. They retain a sense of playfulness and unpredictability, and so it takes both sides of your brain. I like to see the artist's hand when I read comics. I can still see the hand move across the page, the image, and I feel it in my mind as looking recreates movement. But at the same time it appears on an organized page architecturally. The left and the right brain are working by a fusion of writing and drawing. And the best thing is that all you need is pen and paper. You need nothing and no one else. You do not need collaborators, and this fact is great for a certain type of person.

JS: One thing I meant to point out earlier was that I thought it was brilliant that you had your psychotherapist write the Introduction to Misery Loves Comedy.

IB: When I asked her to do it she actually hadn't seen any of the work in the book. I asked her to describe what it's like to have me as a client. I didn't give her any direction to go into but said just write what whatever you want. I had been talking with her for years by that point. I told her I had drawn dark comics. The idea for her writing the Introduction was I said as a joke to a friend that I should probably have my therapist introduce the book. But really, it actually I think serves to explain the book so I'm glad it's there up front. I think it was humorous to have therapist do the introduction. It explains the book and you can really psychoanalyze all the dirty jokes in there.

JS: Did she ever get a copy?

IB: Yes, she has seen the book since.

JS: Is there anything else you'd like to mention?

IB: Yes. I've written a book called Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice that will come out soon. It's being reprinted by Yale University Press.

JS: Thank you, Ivan!

Readers please note: I put a link to Fantagraphics Books on my website, www.thearthealing.com. Thank you.