October 24, 2006
Elizabeth, my wife, works for the state, and due to her work, she needs to travel to various California cities, about once a month. Since we just had a baby in August, and she’s only recently back from maternity leave, she was hoping she wouldn’t have to travel for a while, but it turned out she was needed for a meeting in Long Beach. We didn’t want the baby away from her for a three day trip, because he’s still breast-feeding. But we didn’t want her taking the baby to her business meetings. So we finally decided I would take a little time off work, and go down with her, and watch our little Oscar while she was working.
When we decided that’s what we wanted to do, I emailed Joshua Dysert, who I knew lived in L.A. I said we’d love to hook up with him, if he had any time available. I had met him at Wondercon this year, and thought he was a cool guy, and enjoyed visiting with him. We had an even nicer time with him in San Diego, when we got to hang out with him at a bar.
He wrote us back that he’d love to see us, but that he lived in Venice Beach, which was about forty-five minutes away from our hotel, and he didn’t have a car. We had a rental, and told him we’d call when we got down there and hook up with him one way or another.
What we ended up doing was going to his house and hanging out for about an hour, and then driving him back to our hotel, where we had made dinner plans with some other friends, and then driving him back home. It was totally worth the drive, being able to spend so much time with him. We had a real great time.
His place is amazing. You can see the beach from his place. I was surprised to hear him say he didn’t surf or do any ocean sports. He’s been here for four years, and likes to go for walks at night on the beach. He finds it relaxing.
He said we came to see him on a good day, because he had just gotten some work finished on a deadline, and had some free time. I found out, upon inquiry, that he only writes comics, and doesn’t have another job. He said he hasn’t had another job for five years, but that there were a few times, when he was so poor, (he says this with his huge laugh) that he was starting to seriously consider sucking cock for pay.
The reason Elizabeth and I love Joshua is that he can be so foul, but the way he says it is so interesting or pretty or hilarious. When I first met him, he had told me, “When you’re sucking the devil’s cock, at least he pays on time,” referring to working for big companies, instead of self-publishing. When Elizabeth and I had our son Oscar, he wrote to me to say hello to the host who feeds the parasite (in other words, my wife). He should be a writer.
I of course used this time with him trying to talk about comics as much as I could. I asked about his career, getting into comics. He said he had just wanted to be a writer, and imagined journalism, but was contacted by an artist who wanted someone to write him a comic he could draw. This was ten years ago. He wrote the most mainstream story he could think of, with the intention of getting it to Image Comics and selling lots of copies. It turned out, this book, Violent Messiahs, which got a new artist by the time it went to print, was a phenomenal success, and nothing he’s done since has sold anywhere near as well. He toured all over the country, and in Europe, and had lines of people waiting to sign his book in Germany.
He showed me one of his older comics, and said he’s been working on using less text, so that there’s plenty of room for his artists’ work to really show. Looking over the pages, I didn’t think he had much text at all. And it made me a little ashamed of just how much text I’m always packing into my pages. It’s like I don’t care about the art at all. I just care about the words, and I stuff those panels with them. I could afford to learn about writing more sparsely from him.
I confessed to him that I’ve never read one of his comics, and that the only one of his I own is the issue of Swamp Thing that Richard Corben did.
So he did some small press stuff here and there, and finally landed a DC job on The Demon. He said whenever he felt really pleased with a book, it didn’t do well financially or critically. This one, he said he wrote in a scene where a bunch of men are basically coming on a girl’s face (yow!). I forget what he said the name was for this kind of “party,” but he tried to sneak the use of the word into the comic. And supposedly, the higher-ups looked up this word on the internet, and sites came up, and they clicked on the sites and these sick perverse porn images leapt onto their screens, and they shreiked, “Holy shit! Oh God! OH GOD!” and completely freaked out, and completely edited the art, once the story had been finished. And Joshua said that the finished product was actually even more creepy than if all these guys were coming in a girl’s face, because it was a bunch of naked old men in a circle, and they erased the girl out of the scene. Joshua was convinced he would never be allowed to work for DC again after that, but he said Karen Berger really loves his work over at Vertigo, even though his books keep getting cancelled from lack of sales. He also said he’s mellowed out since then with his subject matter.
He said that at one point, he just couldn’t find any work, and he was getting stretched so thin, he realized he couldn’t make the dream work, and had literally started putting applications in at coffee shops, when out of the blue he suddenly got comics work. And it’s slowly built since then, and at San Diego this year, he actually got flooded with so many offers for work, he wound up having to turn some work down. That must be such a great feeling. He told me about all his secret, as-yet-unannounced books he’s got in the work (he’s doing a post-World War II Hellboy story for Mike Mignola, an Avril Lavigne comic — ??! — and a secret Vertigo project in Africa), and it made me start asking about his process, because it sounded to me like he does extremely careful research, and has a lot of interest in current events around the world.
This got him talking about all his projects in general, and I was surprised when he told me he doesn’t feel he’s ever written in his own “style.” He said his style is “Waiting for Godot.” He said his style is Bergman.
He said he used self-publishing as a way of paying his dues to get his foot in the door. He said he doesn’t know of anyone who has made it in self-publishing, except as a means to break into the industry, and land a paying job at a major company.
He said his first book was written knowing what comics and topics were hot at the time, and trying to gear it toward that. He geared it specifically toward Image and what books they were publishing, so that Image would pick it up, and it would be a success. And I guess he’s had this sort of “agenda” for every book he’s written, where it’s written to serve a needs or tastes of whatever editor or company he’s writing for. So for example, I assume he goes to editors with his resume, and he pitches his ideas, and they tell him, “We need a writer to tell this kind of story, or this particular character,” and he just molds his writing to fit whatever is needed of him. To get the job done, or at least to convince the editors that the job can be done well. I had the impression this is how he’s gotten the jobs he’s gotten. He said he would tell editors he would tell a story in four issues, and then once he was in, he’d stretch it out to eight. But DC is smarter about that, and keeps a closer eye on him throughout the process.
I told him that I have a decent day job, and I have been thinking lately that I might just continue to do what I want to write and draw, and just accept that this decision may mean not getting the higher paying mainstream work. And he agreed that if I can afford to do that and it’s what I want to do, and I can live with knowing that self-publishing may not make me much money, then that works perfectly well. But I think it’s great the decisions he’s made, even though they’re different than what I’ve been thinking, and how bright he is that he can pull it all off, and how successful he’s been at it.
I want to make sure it doesn’t sound like I think he’s “sold out.” He’s making sure the work he does is marketable and what the big companies are looking for, but meanwhile he’s still enjoying each project, doing research and trying different things. He said he pitches ideas if he comes up with something he thinks it would be fun to learn about, and uses that as an excuse to expand his education. If the editors buy the idea, then all of a sudden, he has to research all this stuff he maybe doesn’t even know anything about, and go figure out how to make these story ideas work, and live, and be real. So when I say he hasn’t ever written in “his style,” all that means is he’s creative and daring about pushing himself and trying anything.
After our visit this time around, Elizabeth said that spending time with Josh is like watching a really good film, because he’s so intelligent and entertaining.