Andy Sheie:

I decided I didn't want to be an artist because I came to realize that it is very difficult to create art which will have a significant political impact on culture. Plus, in general the art world is mired in the blind belief in the avant-garde. There is always something new, mind you, but it always incorporates, twists, mangles, or shifts something of the past as well. The avant-garde (which includes many of the exhibits at Speedboat) pushes too hard for that next new idea, increasingly at the cost of well-crafted work.

Thus I've gone in to Landscape Architecture, which should allow me to critically engage the very physical structure of society and culture. What I hope to achieve (or, rather, hope to help to achieve, as it's not a one-man job): a shifting of society away from this increasingly self-centered, self-motivated mess we've got right now.

Underground Performance

I also do more 'arty' performance work at arts theatres and shows. I have a degree in fine art and specialized in performance and my last real 'art' show was as part of a group show at the ICA, London called 'Wrong Bodies' (people marginalized from society because of being physically different, be they disabled, strippers etc) where I did a show called Tableaux Vivants about life modeling which was my first collaboration.

The Smutfest is something started by Jennifer Blowdryer in New York many moons ago, a kind of variety show for sex workers. It's incredibly radical to me because she gets such a selection of people and acts. And all the people are incredibly strong and out there in terms of mainstream society and the shows are such a mixture of talent and chaos... Sometimes there's a real feeling anything might happen because of the edgy natures of the participants- there is certainly nothing safe about them... Performing at the Smutfest in Hamburg in 1996 was a real turnaround in my life, it was definitely one of the high points. If you look back at acts who have appeared at Smutfests over the years, you have Veronica Vera, Annie Sprinkle,  Kembra from The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, as well as many other lesser known people- to me it's part of our history.  I see these people as revolutionary because of their presence as much as what they do.

Alternative Comics

At this point, I thought that all comic books were like superheroes, or like Richie Rich. I didn't realize that there was anything else. So he showed me American Splendor, and Eightball, and Hate, and that's when I first saw that there were other things going on out there…

Mr. Mike:

Someone helped me out, but they're a jackass, so I'm not going to mention them…

Somebody knew someone who works at Fantagraphics and had seen some of the work I'd done in ASSHOLE -WHO-SCREWED-ME-OVER’s magazine. And, they were kind of hot to get some local cartoonists in it, ‘cause there weren't any cartoonists from Minnesota, other than Reid and Kate [the creators of Omaha]. And Reid had cancer at the time…

So they approached me, and I approached Zak [Zak Sally is the creator of Recidivist, as well as the bass player for Low and Enemy Mine], and told Zak that he should do the most stupid strip that he could possibly do, and I'd sign my name to it and we'd see if it got in. And he said "No! I WANT to do this! This is the closest thing to an art exhibit that I will ever have!" And I thought he was joking, but he wasn't.

So he did a five page strip. And I did a three page strip just for the show. He got one panel of his strip up, but I got all three of my pages. I was the only cartoonist from Minneapolis to have their entire comic strip up in that show. And it was kind of a nightmare, 'cause we had come to the closing party, and S. Clay Wilson was supposed to be there (and he was), and Dan Clowes, and some big, like, SUPERMAN GUYS that I didn't know… So we showed-up early, and started drinking. It was about four o'clock. S. Clay Wilson rolls in about six. And by about 7:30 we were all pretty much still a mess.

I remember offering Dan Clowes a cigarette, and just watching him go "NO!"" and just scurrying away. And then having Erin -the woman who was running the show- say "Keep your eye on that S. Clay! Don't give him any more liquor, he's getting way out-of-hand!" And I said "I've had TWICE the liquor he's had today, and I'm TWICE as out-of-hand!" and just laughing. And then she turned to Zak, who was smoking a big cigar in her gallery, and she was like "You're not going to smoke that thing in here, are you ?!" And Zak just looked out at the cigar and said "I AM smoking this thing in here!"

It ended-up with me and S. Clay going over to First Avenue, because he wanted to look at the girls. So we went over there, and Tom Hazelmeyer [from Am-Rep] and the Killdozer guys were hanging-around, and S. Clay and I were seeing who could get a drink tossed in their face first. He told me to go first, and I went out and scored right off the bat. And he just said "That's the stupidist trick I've ever pulled on anybody!…Let’s go to a party."

So this guy wanted to take us to a party in this hippie van, and it was really foggy that night. And he got on 394 and the party was in Uptown. So we're heading out towards Wayzata, and I keep saying to this guy "Hey! We're going to Wayzata!"

He's like "FUCK YOU! I LIVE IN THIS TOWN! I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING!"

…That ended-up being bad, because the van broke down out in Edina in some residential area. The guy is doing maintenance in the back on the motor. S. Clay Wilson was up on top of the van doing a soft shoe. And I was just laying in the fetal position in the middle of the road. That's my story on the Misfit Lit show.

Evan Dorkin:

Up until my teens I wanted to do superhero comics, but after the black and white comics explosion and Love and Rockets, my goals in cartooning reversed big time. My genre influences got overwhelmed by life influences… so that runs to older punk/new wave, ska, rockabilly, independent films/books/comics rather than mass produced male fantasy crap. My friends and my actual social life began to inform my work rather than my childhood fantasy life. If you look at the better comics, they are usually done by men and women who have social lives. The geek stuff is usually done by socially inept fanboys and fangirls who live for Batman, Star Trek: the Next Generation and the next Star Wars movie.

I got in "the business" by meeting industry people in the mid-80's while I worked in a comic shop…It takes a while to get published for almost anyone. I've been doing comics since I was 19 and [it took me about 10 years] to get in print regularly…

The difference between publishers like Marvel or DC, and Darkhorse (who publish Predator), and a truly alternative small press imprint like Slave Labor Graphics is a lot like the differences in major, intermediate and completely independent music labels. Slave Labor is the easiest to work with. I'm pretty much a part of Slave, I spend a lot of my own $$ to promote or some to produce my own books. Dan Vado (Slave's pub/pres) takes a major risk on the books. The comics industry pays less attention to small publishers than the music industry affords small labels.

The comics industry is awful. It's run by fans of superhero or scantily clad women comics that fuel pathetic boys fantasy lives. They don't generally care about anything other than superheroes. You can't sell your books to the general public, because the distributors or retailers only order the major companies' super hero junk.

Mr. Mike:

We were at the Off Ramp in Seattle, and Zak and I were running out of money, and we were wasted. So Zak's like "I'll sit here and watch the table. You go up and try to sell some comic books!" I was like "I'm an alcoholic, and I need to get back to San Francisco. Please buy my comic book!" -And I made a lot of money that night! Probably the most I made the whole time.

But then I got back home, and I got this letter from this girl from Seattle. It was a very nice letter saying that "Oh, I hope you're that cute guy that I bought the comic book from at that show! I like the way that you portray your women in your comic books so honestly and not subjecting them to society's demands, and those sorts of things..." And she's like "I know a lot of people in the Riot Girl crowd here, and they really like your stuff."

I don’t know how good a job I've actually done in terms of political correctness with any of my characters in my comic books. And I'm like "This is NOT making any sense to me!" But that person ended-up being Megan Kelso who does Girlhero.

And it didn't dawn on me [who it was] until we were up there for this cartoonists' convention, and she invited us over to her house. And she didn't know it was me! So we're sitting around, drinking beers… talking, gabbing, and then all of a sudden I started thinking "Megan Kelso...Megan Kelso.." And it just popped-in. So I said "YOU WROTE ME A LETTER!"

And she's just like "No I haven't!"

This was something like six years later. And I say "No, you wrote me a letter. I still have that letter."

I should send her a copy of it, but it was really, really, shameless. I'm sure she was really young. But its just funny to think, you know? I was just completely flabbergasted. I think it was one of the only letters that I got from anybody on that whole tour.

Photography

Cynthia Connolly:

I started doing photography when I went to art school. I went to the Corcoran School of Art. I started art school in the fall of 1981. I kind of did some photography before that, but my camera got stolen. And then I borrowed some equipment in the summer of ’81 and started practicing when I went to school in the fall.

The first year I did photography, and then the last years I majored in graphic design. I didn’t do much photography. And I didn’t do photography basically until 1992. I did some stuff from 82-92, but it was just stuff that people asked me to do. It wasn’t like I was very interested in doing photography. I was actually focused on other projects. And It wasn’t until about 1992 or 1993 that I actually started doing a lot of photography again.

I had a problem getting a printer for the Banned in DC book because there was one photograph in it of somebody who was nude. You know, Martin printed a book —which has been re-printed recently- called You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive, and I think he went to at least a hundred printers who wouldn’t print it because "Fuck" was in the title of the book. The printer that I used eventually for Banned in D.C. is a really great guy who really supports the arts and free expression. He came from an Eastern Bloc country and I have a feeling that’s why he appreciates it so much. He understand it. He printed some books of nude photos, and he told me that when he sent it to the bindery —this was in the eighties- they just destroyed the books and sent it to him. People forget about this. I don’t think they really actually believe that within our lifetime that this stuff was like that. But it was.

That’s the project that I started working on that sort of introduced me back into photography. And I used it as sort of a tool to teach myself again how to do photography.

Those photos toured from 95-97. I don’t tour with those photos anymore. They’re hanging in a store here in Arlington Virginia. They’re kind of from a different era now, and express a different time that’s not now. I don't really like to work with older stuff. What I’m working with now are more recent photos that I did of landscapes and people I know.

I just remember in the early 90’s I thought it would be really cool to do art shows that toured like a band. But then I realized that that would be impossible because you can’t hang art for one night, and everyone won’t come and see it. And then you can’t take it down —its too high maintenance. There’s too much work involved in just hanging the art and getting the word out for each night.

Bands have it a lot easier because a lot of other people do the promotion for you, like radio stations and stuff. You just show up and there’s sort of a built-in crowd a lot of times. There’s sort of a word-of-mouth. There’s more fervor about bands and music than there is about art. So it (touring art shows) didn’t really work out that way. Plus a lot of people can’t seem to think to go on the night of the opening. They think that it will be there a while, so they come some other time. So art, unfortunately, has to have a lengthier (period of time). Its kind of old-fashioned in the way that it would really have to be somewhere for a while for people to see it.

So I set up a tour of me and Pat Graham’s photographs. And basically figured I’ll just deal with it however I can. And every month we’ve moved it to a different location. It became exceedingly hard. In the beginning it wasn’t every month, it was every three months. Once I got it to the West Coast it was every month, and it was completely crazy! I either had people who were out there drive it to the next location, or I tried to get people to hang it for me. And usually I try to kill two birds with one stone. I would go out and take them down from a certain show and have a closing, so to speak, instead of an opening. And then move it to the next place and have an opening, so I could be gone for maybe a week-and-a-half, or two weeks and do it and then come back home.

I get people to ship it UPS from one place to another, and I’ll just pay them for the UPS, if I couldn’t get out there to do it. Pat unfortunately couldn't afford to go out and do it, so I ended up doing most of the work out west. It definitely would have been way easier if you had more people involved in something like that. Maybe it’d harder, because you’d have to orchestrate the people. (Laughs.)I don’t know.

I had a job, too, so it was pretty damn hard! And then I'd have to promo for the next show, and flyers and stuff. It got to be pretty insane.

The places that I booked the photos in were mostly music-related. Music stores,

or clubs, or people that had their own alternative spaces. I didn’t book anything in galleries. ‘Cause galleries book so far in advance, and I just wasn’t into their whole scene. Because galleries are just so high maintenance, just to even get a show. I just wanted to do it, and go, and then move to the next place. Which for artists is kind of super-alternative. To this day, I think that the whole art scene is so high maintenance, that personally I think the whole thing should be re-written… I’ll still do stuff on my own.

The Art Scene in D.C… For all that I’ve been doing with art, I don’t think there’s any gallery in D.C. that even knows who I am, or knows what my art is! They probably don’t have any clue that I’m a D.C. artist. I get more people who know who I am outside of D.C. than I do in my own city! I’m not trying to say that this is a crime, or whatever, its just the way the art scene is… its exasperating! But on the other hand, I always try to look at it like, its kind of cool that it exists that way, because I’m gonna go find something else that I like better, and just go do it. And you end up meeting a lot of really crazy cool people that way, without blocking yourself into some other scene.

Art Cars