I am in the process of answering some interview questions, which is a very flattering thing to be asked to do. The first one is, of course, “How did you get into comics?” I wrote the answer below but decided it was too pretentious and obtuse. So I sent something more straightforward instead. Then I decided that this original answer might be more interested to read, because it was definitely more interesting to write. I thought I would post it here.
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There are lots of different ways I could answer this question, but to be honest I’m a little hesitant to impose narrative on my own past. I could talk about how I was only read manga for several years. I could talk about when I think I ‘got serious’ about making comics. I could tell you who my favorite cartoonists were in high school. But I could also make an argument that any one of those things, or any other biographic detail, isn’t particularly important to the work I make today. I sometimes find myself skimming through this question when reading interviews with other cartoonists (which I otherwise really enjoy reading).
If you were to ask, say, Dan Clowes how he got into comics, he would probably give you some slight variation on the answer he has given every other time he has answered this question over the past several years. I think his answer is both more true and less true than one that I might give. It’s more true because he has had many opportunities to think about the trajectory of his interest in comics, both because he has been asked about it in interviews, etc. so many times and simply as a function of growing older. He might have remembered things from his childhood which he now recognizes as important to his identity as a cartoonist, or he might have rediscovered some forgotten comic which had an influence on his early work. However, it’s also less true because he has edited down the innumerable twists and turns of his life into a digestible, relatively straightforward answer that he can give to the nice people at NPR. Maybe he has chosen exactly the right details to give a complete and accurate picture of his development as a person and as a cartoonist. But maybe not.
Also, I suspect that some of the cartoonists who claim to remember the first comic they ever read are lying. I certainly don’t remember mine.
(I’m not trying to pick on Clowes. Just a random example.)