9UNP0350 Lynda Barry, Paul Buhle, Jame Danky: A Serious Look at Comics Transcript

 When you think of comic books, do you have visions of funny animals and heroes in tights? Do you think of comics as juvenile and not really worth your time? Well, think again and take a serious look at comics under the direction of Lynda Barry and featuring Paul Buhle, presenting his new book "Comics in Wisconsin," and James Danky, author with Denis Kitchen of "Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix. " Comics have grown up and so has our appreciation for graphic work that marries text and image. Today's fans and scholars look at comics as a key element in our understanding of culture and even our lives. So I am pleased to present Lynda Barry. ( applause ) Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher, all at the same time, and found that they are very much alike. She is the imitable creator behind the syndicated strip Ernie Pook's Comeek featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddie. ( applause ) Publisher Drawn and Quarterly plans to publish a multi-volume hardcover collection of Ernie Pook's Comeek starting this year, as well as a collection of Near-Sighted Monkey. Lynda is also the recipient of this year's Wisconsin Library Association's RR Donnelley Award for her book "What It Is" which also won an Eisner Award which is like the Pulitzer of cartoon art. ( applause ) Except for the money part. It's like the Nobel Prize of cartoon art. 

 Except for the money part. Actually, though, she's a really peaceful person. Born in Wisconsin in 1956, Lynda studied at Evergreen State College where she became good friends with Simpsons creator Matt Groening. Her work has been widely praised, and her book "The Good Times are Killing Me," also adapted as an off-Broadway musical, won the Washington State Governor's Award. Barry currently offers her workshop, Writing the Unthinkable, all over the place. ( applause ) Thank you. She's really a famous person. And she's from Wisconsin so we want to. . . 

 That's the most important part. ( applause ) Paul Buhle was a senior lecturer at Brown University, and in retirement has returned to Madison where he earned his PhD in history, right? At the University of Wisconsin. His 40 published volumes include a dozen comic art volumes, five biographies and a book series on the victims of the Hollywood blacklist. Paul and I collaborated to produce Howard Zinn's graphic history "A People's History of American Empire" which was featured last year. Paul is also editor of the new book "Comics in Wisconsin" with book designed by Madison's own Steve Chappell. ( applause ) And James Danky is the author/editor of dozens of books on topics as varied as African American newspapers, women's publications and the Native American press. In 1974 he published his first book, "Undergrounds," a bibliography of alternative newspapers. He is on the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he also founded and directed the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America. In 2007 Danky retired from the Wisconsin Historical Society after building their nationally renowned collections for 35 years. So that's it for me and thank you, so much, again. 

 ( applause ) Take it away Lynda. Lynda Barry: All right, I get to be your moderator which, of course, is like my dream because I was the oldest girl in my family and also the loudest kid on my block. I was the person who could talk so loud that I really don't need a microphone. ( laughter ) But let's pretend. So before we start there's one thing I want to ask you, I want you to think one of your favorite comic strips and I'm going to count to three and we're just going to say the name of our favorite comic strip out loud. Not mine, of course, I know that's what you'd say but think of something else. I'll give you an extra second. Okay, one, two, three. ( shouting ) One more time. One, two, three. 

 ( shouting ) Okay, now one that you hate. All right? One, two, three. ( shouting ) One, two, three. ( shouting ) Thank you. I like audience participation. I'm sitting next to two super smart guys who know so much about comics that when you say the word comics you can see their foreheads go like this. ( laughter ) So I'd like to start out by asking you, Mr. Danky. When I met Mr. Danky and I found out his last name was Danky I realized he could do anything. 

 He could be a spy. He could be the president. He could be a revolutionary. He could run a restaurant, Danky's restaurant. So I'd like to turn it over to you. James Danky: Thank you. It's good to know you have career options. A number of you, thinking of those who are particularly from the Madison area, would have had a chance to see the exhibit that Denis and I did at the Chazen Museum. And thinking about the high tone setting that this year's panel is in, Lynda, Paul and I did a panel last year at the Stage Door, slightly lower level amenities. Nice place though, good crowd, good questions. 

 But being here at Overture it strikes me that it's the third sort of obvious point of recognition about comics. And we had a good question that I'll come back to, not directed at me but directed at Paul and Harvey earlier, about, what should we say, the institutionalization of comics. And the questioner worried about that and Paul, I think, effectively responded to that that if it's good for artists then it's got to be good. But taking comics and particularly comix with an X and getting them accepted, is not about art because comics have always been art, but rather it's about making use of the cultural institutions and the kind of -- that they add to those things. That's the much more difficult job that Denis and I have been at work on through this book and earlier the exhibit. It was a success at the Chazen Museum, I thought so, but then again I would, wouldn't I? But when I looked the other day at the numbers and over 10,000 people have visited the museum, and if you're local enough you know how difficult it was to scale the chain-link fence to get into the Chazen this summer. ( laughter ) But that aside, it was a real confirmation for me of the broad audience that I really, really hoped was there for comix with an X. When you talk about the 1960s, I am a historian as is Paul although I have not taught the 1960s as much as Paul by any means, one thing I'm sure about is that you immediately hear the soundtrack because it's inescapable. I assume that some time in several millennia from now that people will still be forced to listen to classic rock. ( laughter ) I know why I tap my toes, but as I always say to students, I don't understand why you are interested. 

 ( laughter ) But that ubiquity that we associate with rock music from the 1960s is definitely to be opposed by the almost complete absence of visual images from the 1960s. Some of the audience of the right age that would be geezer like me or much younger will know them through film, but getting to a lot of the images that were the crucial elements of the 1960s is not really possible because they're not easily available to you. And so that one of the ideas behind doing underground classics was to take one set of those images, some of the most important, most challenging, most interesting of those images done by comics artists in the 1960s and '70s and bring them back. And there are a lot of good reasons to do that, but I certainly wouldn't ignore the fact that I just wanted to see them again and I wanted to see them on walls of the museum. You have to recognize one's own personal kind of motivation. We get here to comix with an X coming after a mostly, for my mind, a mostly a dreary period in the 1950s with comics. I bought tons of comics, and I would think that that's true for many people, more likely male than female, but everybody liked comic books I think in some degree or another. And everyone had their own favorites or least favorites as Lynda just prompted us to know. I was very found of Uncle Scrooge, not so found of superheroes but I certainly read enough of those. But what I took away from that then, not that I understood it, and now as an adult I do understand, is the kind of limited range of motion, literally physical, that the characters would do. 

 Sure they could fly over buildings and they could do all kinds, go into the sun, all kinds of things like that, but they really didn't do a lot of the things that human beings do. They become like John Wayne westerns. It's a very antiseptic view of human life, if violent. In the 1960s it was possible to imagine completely different kinds of comics, and I was sort of at the end of my tether reading comics, I would still read some Walt Disney comics and stories and perhaps you'll recognize your own reading habits for comics in this, but some of the rest were just completely boring. But then I discovered Zap and I thought, oh, my god yes, this is what I've been waiting for. I didn't know what I've been waiting for, but this is what I've been waiting for. When we say comix with an X, the subtitle of our book and the exhibit, that we mean to refer to the visual and textual revolution that occurs in the 1960s whose consequences are absolutely felt today by comic artists that all of the sudden you could change everything, and you could have comics that were fully dimensional and fully realized that they could envision on paper and in word everything that everybody does, and of course that includes lots of things that will make people unhappy and embarrassed or blanch or any of the things that actually occur in real life. In the spring of last year knowing that the book and the exhibit were about to come out after an incredibly long, more than elephantine gestation period, I was working with some students to use social media, something I knew nothing about, to help promote the exhibit, and the student's question was how do comics become art? And I said it's easy, all we have to do is get them into the museum. ( laughter ) That's all it takes. Really, trust me. 

 They are art already but we just have to get them inside. And that's really, as we would say in comic's parlance, that's the origin story. In 1977 I met Denis Kitchen. I organized a conference on book publishing in Wisconsin. I knew Denis' work from many things from Mom's Homemade to his covers and more for the Bugle American in Milwaukee which was widely distributed in Madison. And I remember quite clearly saying to him as we met, saying, boy, wouldn't it be great to see original comic art on the wall of the museum. You should be really careful with those casual statements. It took us 33 years so we are indeed an overnight success. But it took not only our thinking about it for that great length of time but it took, about five years ago, it took our presentation of this, and we had great trepidation to Russell Panczenko at the Chazen Museum, saying what if we did this. And I don't know that either of us, I think we just kept talking. 

 We didn't realize that Russell had already said yes. I was just prepared for a large sales job, not a simple sales job. But Russell said yes, gave us some questions that we needed to go forth and answer. And we dallied for several years. And about three years ago we finally got serious on it in terms of putting it together. Taking something we knew something about, Denis a lot about because he's a major creator of underground publishers. But to figure out how to take comics and make them work in a museum context. And it's another example of the usually sausage metaphor that you'd much rather see it on the walls then learn all of the -- discussions. When I would explain to Denis that they weren't giving us the entire museum and so some of the works would have to be cut. But still at 125 pieces it was a very broad survey of the materials produced by artists beginning in the '60s, continuing into the '70s. 

 We used the closing date in the early '90s, but that's to take in chronologically a couple of the pieces made by the artists who came of age in the 1960s. As Jay Lynch reminds us in his introduction, one of the major non-comics inspirations for pretty much everybody in our show was Paul Krassner's The Realist. I know that it was that way for me. I can very clearly recall picking up the first issue and thinking to myself, oh, my god, I didn't know you could write or think like this. And that really builds, that's one pull, the other one would be Harvey Kurtzman's astonishing Mad magazine of which Paul will talk more. I think that the power of Mad magazine to influence people is pretty obvious to me in the culture, but for me it's encompassed the fact that I can remember two very distinct stories or written lines in Mad magazine it must be from the early mid-1950s, you can remember something 50 years, the Mad definition of life insurance. If you win you lose, if you lose you win. ( laughter ) Then the other one is a visual one, it's the kind of teaching about drawing your life that Lynda doesn't use probably because she likes to encourage people. But it was a picture of Anytown USA and a set of instructions, and you were to draw all the curbs purple with your crayons and all the streets yellow and the phone wires green or the trees red and all these kinds of things and the last it said, show it to your teacher, she'll think you're stupid. ( laughter ) But it's that transition from the '50s in Mad magazine where those are some sharper examples, reflected in my own selections, but it then becomes a much, much harder edged satire in the 1960s with many things, but certainly including Paul Krassner's The Realist. 

 And we wanted to incorporate the kind of comic art that comes out of those two literary sources. I decided that since it's a book festival I would read a little bit. Despite what your parents may have told you comics are not trash. Garish, sometimes tasteless and violent, frequently non-comical. Yes, they can also be needle-sharp, provocative and brimming with fresh language and ideas. Sorry, Mom. And contrary to what you've been told by pop culture historians, comics did not exactly begin in the 1890s with the Yellow Kid or Little Nemo. As an art-driven, story-telling medium, comics go back at least as far as the mid-19th century and arguably to Goya, the Greco-Roman frescoes, the biotapestry and the cave walls of Lascaux. Nor did comics with the hip terminal X spring magically to life in 1968 with Zap Comix No. 1 or The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. 

 As with so many other art forms, legitimate or not, the evolution of comics is long, complex and worthy of serious research and explanation. Sorry, man. As a subset of the comic genre underground comics are indeed a product of the '60s. Like a new life form, they were heaved up on shore during a decade of social and political turmoil, of changing societal and cultural norms. First came the alternative or underground newspapers. The editors of the LA Free Press and the San Francisco Oracle or the East Village Other and thousands of other similar papers nationwide including Madison's own Connections, among many, combined a free swinging journalistic style with a strong visual sense attracting a small army of artists whose wild graphics and mind-boggling satire exploded in their pages as well as on concert posters, leaflets, t-shirts and comics books. From San Francisco to Boston, from Milwaukee to Austin, the artists and editors of the undergrounds -- committed themselves to building the movement, a new culture that embraced and endorsed the values of young Americans, namely, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Did we mention there's a war on. I've got some of the visuals from this, and in the presentation just before us with Harvey and Paul that they talked about the importance of the Masters of American Comic show which some of you might have a chance to see in Milwaukee or even in its truncated form in New York and particularly in its origin in LA. Our book and the exhibit, of course, really takes its keys, from that we wanted to show the original work of comic artists as they drew it not as it was printed. 

 I wanted to give you a chance to compare those two things so you could see the more ubiquitous form that you could purchase frequently with the staples down the back, but also compare it with the way the artist actually drew it themselves. And this is something that was marvelous to see in the master show and we hope is of interest in our own. And everybody here is over 18 I think. And I'm barely technologically literate to do this. A key element for anybody interested in comics and how they come to be accepted is of course Art Spiegelman's "Maus. " If you have a chance to hear Art and observe him smoking inside smoke-free buildings on campus when he's giving lectures you know that he's not only an extraordinary artist but an incredibly perceptive historian and commentator and critic of comics. With the special Pulitzer given to Spiegelman now almost 20 years ago that comics really were introduced into mainstream definitions of culture. But he's also an undergrounder. Jim Mitchell of Milwaukee picks up certainly on Pro Junior, a name that was handed around among many kinds of many artists in underground comics, but also reflects the specific sexual nature of many comics. I can't imagine how good this must look blown up behind me. 

 Anyway, the Walt Disney Corporation for whom we have to thank the fact that copyright will never die. ( laughter ) It eventually will become impossible to use virtually anything because somebody's 15th cousin must possibly still be around to claim it. But when our friends in the Air Pirates put together their jam and they were sued by Disney, brutally, for years and years and years even though none of them had any money but Disney spent millions and millions of dollars and there's a little book on the Air Pirates suit that has the details of this. Charles Burns. Barry: I went to high school with him and college with him. And he painted incredible paintings in the hallway going up from the cafeteria. Just to let you know he's real. ( laughter ) He is. And he was as talented then as he clearly still is today. He's a very active artist and his works are just marvelous. 

 Rory Hayes, long deceased. You can't always take all of the drugs possible and survive. But when Robert Crumb saw Hayes work he noted that undergrounds now have a primitive, and someone else also described Rory's work which is really astonishing; there's a good book on that, "Where Demented Wented" that his brother did. Someone described him as the Grandma Moses of underground comics. I can see some of that there. Sharon Rudahl of Madison. Yes. Paul mentioned her earlier doing the graphic adaptation of the biography of Emma Goldman. She's in Working. She's an active artist today and was an active artist then dealing with sexually explicit themes, obviously. 

 Robert Williams is today a fine arts painter, and like Charles Burns always was a spectacular artist. ( laughter ) Musicians jam but so do cartoonists. So the cartoonist here passed around the same board coast to coast, those really were the '60s and '70s weren't they, driving around where each of the artists drew themselves. My collaborator, and likewise Paul's, Denis Kitchen is up in the upper left looking appropriately serious. He's a great guy too with a wonderful sense of humor, but he frequently was the only reasonable person. He's the one that they pushed out in front and he has great talents as a publisher and literary agent too. Denis had a good sense of humor and has always liked older things, something Robert Crumb, among many others, had in common. Denis has always loved pin-backed buttons so he created the famous cartoonist series, as well as creating a series of union button that read The United Cartoon Workers of America. Grass Green was the only African American who was part of the underground moment. And this is his quintessential Wildman and Rubber Boy. 

 This is not by an underground artist. ( laughter ) You will be noting. It is, of course, Jericho's famous painting. But it influenced the work as a source of Will Elder who's not an underground artist and was the subject of a wonderfully laudatory obituary in the New York Times when he died at 92 last year or earlier this year, and he drew this and we had this as the last image when you left the show at the Chazen that showed really the ends of undergrounds. If you can read it there the little board floating in the water this says head shop. And as Paul remarked earlier in the earlier session he talked that undergrounds came to an end, people stopped buying them long before 1987 mostly, and it really becomes this time bounded phenomena. Because comix with an X could do anything, then comics could also be drawn by women, of course. And they're many important artists in that, but this one I would include because it's done by Trina Robbins who is a good friend of all of us, and Trina is also a historian of comics. Her extensive books about the history of women in comics have uncovered a whole different history. Trina reacted specifically to the kind of male chauvinism at the time and moved it along. 

 Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, strongest narrative, longest published series, I believe, in comics. Howard Cruse of Stuck Rubber Baby, most important and first gay cartoonist and a wonderful guy. And with that, I'm going to close. Barry: I'm going to pass it on to Mr. Buhle. Paul Buhle: Okay. Barry: First I want to say about Mr. Buhle. Paul Buhle: Yes. Barry: He has tasted the wine of the east coast. 

 ( laughter ) Buhle: It was bitter. Barry: And he came back to have more beer and cheese curds of Wisconsin. And we thank him for that. ( applause ) Buhle: I'm going to be a lot more brief than brother Danky because I want to make sure we have plenty of time for discussion. I don't think I would be wrong in saying everybody who came here has read a whole lot of Lynda Barry, and is eager to hear her and talk about her which is just fine because me too. I said in this book, I'm loathe to hold it up but will anyway, that in the history of Wisconsin comic art it begins with a guy named Frank O. King from Tomah and little banners on one of the streets in Tomah say home of Frank O. King and underneath that it says Gasoline Alley. It's the first comic strip, arguably, successful comic strip that has continuity. That is, day after day, week after week, month after month it was dull as dishwater after about the first three months but it lasted about 50 years anyways. 

 ( laughter ) And millions of people couldn't imagine starting a day without reading Gasoline Alley. If I start there, then I come to Lynda as influential in her own way as Frank O. King was in his time. And I'll try to justify that very briefly by starting to say that my friend, really important artist of the last 20 years, Ben Katchor, likes to lecture on the history of comics by saying the history of art in the last several hundred years was, until the later 20th century, a process of separating words from pictures. The great goal was to purify words from being infected by pictures and pictures from being infected by words. Something that starts way, way back because comic art and all art begins with the saga that's poetry, music, dancing and some kind of image altogether. Well, purifying this sort of ends up with abstract expressionism in the '50s. The free enterprise form of art as Henry -- used to call it, proudly, and was first going to be broken down a number of ways. Women's art, underground comics and all of the kinds of things in one specifically important way among others and that is that these forms rebelling brought back figuration or the existence of the figure, the recognized human figure and the story as being somewhere in the center of art. Now it had never been lost, that notion had never been lost in popular comic strips since the 1890s. 

 They were deeply beloved. Those in the sports pages that most people ever read in daily newspapers, and they were the most interesting part of daily newspapers, by and large. And why did people like them? Because they liked the stories because very frequently people did not speak or read English all that great and comic strips had this particular form that allowed people with limited skills, immigrants and people from rural areas, to find an art form that was meaningful to them and gave them a certain sensibility. Well, what happens from 1970s on is called, by some, post-modernism, which is even a worse term than modernism. It means almost nothing or anything you want it to mean. But what it does suggest or help us to grapple with is the ways in which the story comes back. The story is recovered, recuperated. And if underground comics collapsed shortly after the electric eye store on Gilman Street, some of you may be old enough to remember that, sold a lot of drug paraphernalia that never did anybody any harm, as far as I know, and a lot of wild psychedelic posters, black light apparatus and so forth, and my comic Radical America comic which is the first underground comic to appear in Madison and a bunch of other stuff. But, hey, the police got rid of those drug paraphernalia stores before 1980 and underground comic artists lost their venues. And many of the finest artists that I know didn't draw for 10 years or more because there was no place to publish them. 

 This was a thin kind of strain after 1980 because it was even tougher than before to publish comics created entirely of your own imagination and sensibility and free of all of the strictures limitations on comics in daily strips or comics in comic books. Among the outstanding alternative artists, I would say for most among the outstanding alternative artists, Lynda. And there are a couple of things or many things to say about this, but I want to just observe a couple of them. The first one is that she makes us think about how unhappy our teenage years were. ( laughter ) And sometimes we think our teenage years couldn't have been that unhappy so maybe they weren't as bad as we thought they were before. ( laughter ) Which is good for me. I find reading them very therapeutic in that way. Although sometimes they remind me of really horrible things in my teenage years so they make me a little depressed, but that also has an artistic creative quality to it. The second thing is that when people write criticism, especially English department people, but anybody, a journalist's criticism of comic books, comic art, and Harvey Pekar and I, among others, face all kinds of unpleasantness from people writing about these books that we produce. Either they hate comics and they want to make an observation about why they hate comics or they like one comic which may be superheroes or American Splendor and they hate all other forms of comics. 

 Those are the main currents. Or they wish they were comic artist themselves and they would have done it a lot better. ( laughter ) So it's one of those things and there's a world of hurt out there and Harvey and I and Lynda are a little exposed to that hurt. When people write about these things they very rarely write about the art unless they're writing an insulting thing. And if they actually write about the art saying, oh, such and such an artist is good or bad, it's sort of like reading rock and roll criticism as it's always existed. Number one, I like it or I hate it. And number two, it's great or it's terrible or I found one thing about it that resembles something in the history of art class I took 20 years ago. In other words, it's very, very hard for even sympathetic critics to pin down what is the artistic element that goes along with the narrative. It's much more easy to quote song lyrics than to talk about the music. And likewise for people talking about and thinking about comic art. 

 I really want to close so to save more time with this observation that if Frank O. King, whose work could be a lot better than most of his daily stuff. Sometimes he had these color strips in Sunday papers or he was just thinking about being in Tomah or in the -- suburb of Chicago where he lived with his money. And you see all these leaves and people walking around in the woods and so forth. It really is beautiful, it raised comic art to a dimension it hadn't reached and was quite astonishing for ordinary readers who hadn't encompassed anything like modern art. So that's really remarkable. But Lynda's comic art is as stunning for its artist quality as it is for its narrative. The more so with the new book "What It Is" because her pallet of color but also her recuperation of that 1919 revolutionary idea which was called Dada. You could take up anything, newspaper scraps, old music, anything that had ever been printed or not printed, pieces of wallpaper, and put it all together again in a new way, and it would show that redemption has to come from the scraps of ordinary life. It doesn't come from the heavens. 

 It comes right out of the crap of ordinary life. If we take that as a premise and see this is the real basis for art then the whole idea of art becomes a lot more democratic. What I think is the strongest about "What It Is" is that it's a testament or testimony to the capacity of ordinary people to make their lives different than they are. And looking back 40 years to the '60s in Madison, the most revolutionary thing wasn't mainly opposing the war, although it was really important. It wasn't smoking dope and listening to The Beatles, although that certainly was important to me. And it wasn't even organizing a teaching assistants association, which was incredibly important. All of these things were important, but the idea that perfectly ordinary people in Madison, mostly young people, took this and internalized this and were capable of making their lives over by using all of their creative potential and much more than they were using now. And that by doing so and knowing other people and being in contact with other people by doing so, they would create a very powerful current of counterculture or some kind of a culture which ultimately is the only basis for getting rid of this monstrous global system upon us and finding a way to a different kind of society. Thank you. ( applause ) Barry: All right. 

 Now let's lower our brows from the high brow to the low brow, here I am. Or the unibrow, let's go unibrow. Let's go totally democratic. ( laughter ) If any of you know my work and if you hold it in any kind of esteem, I'm about to change that by telling you what my favorite comic strip is, my absolute favorite comic strip is in this world. Family Circus. ( laughter ) Buhle: That hurt. Barry: See, I know. I can, because I'm sober now, when I hear that you groan, I don't get violent. ( laughter ) But if I had two shots of whiskey and somebody starts putting down Family Circus, I'll slug you, I really will. ( laughter ) And I'll tell you why. 

 I want to talk to you a little bit about comics. And it's interesting which comics you get attached to. I don't think anybody really gets to pick, especially if you start reading early on. Before I could read I knew about the comics because it was the only art we had in our house in the comic strips. And I knew I was going to be able to read, I had heard that was going to happen. ( laughter ) And I had also heard this thing of doing something for the rest of your life. So I wanted to make these vows for the rest of my life. Like I made a vow that I would remember this fence that I saw for the rest of my life, and I do, I remember it but it's like okay. ( laughter ) I can still see it. And so the strips that I swore I was going to read for the rest of my life are mostly gone. 

 One was called Dondi which was this strange little guy who had orphan Annie's eyes. Remember Orphan Annie had white eyes. There were no eyes drawn; he had pure black eyes. And I couldn't even, I didn't know what that dude was about but he was the only kind of cute guy sort of my age. ( laughter ) And then there was Brenda Starr and I only started reading her, made that commitment, because she was about to marry the Wolf-Man which I never found out what happened because by the time I could read that had already passed. So I didn't know how that turned out. And then the other one is Family Circus which you all know is in a little circle. A little circle with Dolly, PJ, Jeffy and Billy and the dead grandparents. ( laughter ) See you all know just who I'm talking about. Okay, tell me you didn't love it when Mommy gave Billy a piece of mail and said get this to the mail box, and you had to follow all the dotted lines that he went through. 

 Plus there was a clue, there was a dog in there named Barfy so that's your first clue. If we were studying this as literature we'd say, all is very sane except there's a dog named Barfy. ( laughter ) I loved that strip because I lived in a very violent and troubled home. The way I describe it is it's blood and hair on the walls and ceilings. And teeth around. It was a very violent, difficult home. Lots of alcoholism. It was an immigrant family. My mom was from the Philippines and her entire family came over. So I used to look at this little circle and just think God damn. 

 I didn't think God damn. Yeah, I did. ( laughter ) God damn, how can I get into there from where I am? ( laughter ) So you all have heard this, you start hearing this crazy thing like when you see great art you burst into tears. You heard that, right? Just like you hear if you could really sing you can break this glass. When you were a little kid and you were by yourself and going ahh, ahh. ( laughter ) I wanted to burst into tears really bad for some incredible art. And I went to Europe by myself which sounds bad ass but I was 26 and I was terrified of everyone so I went through the whole trip like having the worst time and I wrote a lot of letters, I'm having a great time here, to myself. ( laughter ) But I've been hoping to burst into tears so I go to the Uffizi Gallery, I think it's in Florence, and I also really wanted to burst into tears next to a cute guy because then he'd look at me and go, she's so sensitive we must be together. So there were times I was worried because I almost burst into tears but there were no cute dudes around so it's like suck them back up. ( laughter ) So the Botticelli's Primavera had just been cleaned, and it was in a room by itself and so I walked in, sure enough cute dude at 11:00. 

 There is the thing and I think if I'm going to burst into tears here it goes. And I was really trying to force myself, and I was able to squeeze one out but it was on the wrong side. ( laughter ) Dude leaves, nothing happens, I have a miserable trip, I come home. Time passes, I'm a cartoonist and I get invited to the Reuben Awards, that's like the big awards. And all the real cartoonists were there. The real ones, you know? I saw, the person that blew my mind the most was the woman who did Lockhorns, you know that terrible strip. If you came from a family of divorce it was the most horrible, that's my life. But her name's Bunny, and she had and I said you have the most beautiful profile I've ever seen, and she said I'll give you the name of my plastic surgeon. ( laughter ) And then the other person I saw who really upset me was the woman who draws Cathy. I was so mad because she's really pretty, she's really thin, she's totally together and I thought you are making your living off the women with asses like mine. 

 ( laughter ) You lying cartoonist. ( laughter ) And I'm meeting all these, the real ones. And then all of the sudden one of my friends says, oh, Lynda you like Family Circus right? And I go yeah. And this is Jeff Keane. So Bil Keane is the guy who draws the strip, he wasn't there, he's elderly, and oftentimes a comic strip is passed down to a son. So this was Jeffy, you know, Jeff. ( laughter ) And I looked at him and I went, ahh, ahh. Like it wasn't cute bursting into tears, it was totally like I was shaking snot, and he starts walking backwards because this has never happened to him in his life. ( laughter ) And he was like, what the hell is going on? And I keep walking toward him. ( laughter ) But I'm shaking really bad and so I say, excuse me for one minute and I go like around a corner and there's a potted plant. 

 Just keep it together. You keep it together. It's just Jeff. It's Jeff Keane. Walk over and I said, Hi, I'm sorry, ahh, ahh. ( laughter ) And I could never stop bursting into tears when I saw him. And at this convention it became the joke to try to get him anywhere in my line of sight. ( laughter ) But I realized the reason I burst into tears was when I shook his hand I had crawled through that circle, I found a way to do it. And the way I did it was by drawing a picture. The way I did it was by drawing a picture and writing something. 

 So one of the feelings that I have about comics is I believe, first of all, that they're a fantastic portal in a container of experience. And I also believe that they have an absolute biological function. If you all just knew who your favorite comic strip was when I said yell it out, and you knew you hated it too which is also a good, in fact I'll tell you another little cartoonist dirt. Garfield is not a strip that I care for deeply. ( laughter ) But although I've seen, what do they have Garfield without the dude in it? Or is it without Garfield in it? Without the cat in it, and it's like this Zen thing and yeah right on. But I found out that that guy, the Garfield guy whose name shall never pass my lips, Jim Davis, he doesn't actually draw his strip, and he doesn't write the jokes. But he signs his strip. And he was signing his strip with a felt pen that fades. It has -- ink. So I got to see some of his strips where they were still there but his signature was slowly disappearing. 

 Which reminds me of one other story I just want to tell really quick that's kind of a super good cartoonist story. There was a guy I know who was a fantastic oil painter. He lives in the Washington, DC. He was the guy they hired to do the pictures of all the executives, those fine oil paintings. Anyway, he was painting this one guy and he told me, he goes, the guy was a dick, I'm just going to tell you that straight up, he was a dick. So what he had done was he found he had these oil paints that it turns out when you paint over them the oil paints kind of come through. Sort of like if you put felt pen on a wall and you try to paint it and that felt pen comes through. So he decided that he would paint and make his money and do this perfect corporate picture of the guy but underneath he painted him with big earrings, total in drag, like hard core drag. ( laughter ) And it's going to take 30 years for this to push through. ( applause ) But that's a comic strip. 

 To me that is a comic strip. That's a comic strip that is in time. Here's this thing that we're starting out with and here's what pushes through. So I want just talk to you about being a cartoonist just for a little bit. I'll talk to you about being a cartoonist and about kids because that's something that I'm really interested in. I'm a cartoonist but I love to tell kids I'm a cartoonist because when I tell them I'm a cartoonist they go, really? I go, yeah. They go, draw something. So I draw a chicken. And they'll go, you are. And I'll go, I know. 

 ( laughter ) But where I live in my little town of Footville, we're in greater Footville, actually. ( laughter ) I'm terrified that anybody will one, find out I'm a cartoonist because adults tend to get very sad for me. They'll go, you're a cartoonist, will you draw something? I draw the same damn chicken. And it's like, you keep following that dream. ( laughter ) Everyone needs a dream and that one's yours. ( laughter ) But my feeling is with comics one of the, I don't think, at least for me, and it was cool that you were talking about Studs Terkel because Studs Terkel was a huge influence for me only because he actually wrote down the way people spoke. That and then Zap, one of the comics that was in the collection that you put up, it was this Zap comic and I loved, no matter what I did it was always because of cute guys that I was trying to find. So they were hippies, they were cute hippies, so I was trying to find them, and they'd go into head shops so I'd follow them. And then I'd find the comics there, and I'd kind of forget about the cute guys for a while. And I saw Zap. 

 It was Zap No. 0, I think, but it had a comic strip called Meatball. I was 12 and all it was was people walking down the street. They looked like they were on the east coast and Meatballs started hitting them and transforming them. And I remember the best part was some beatnik got hit and then afterwards he went all right. ( laughter ) Buhle: It was LSD. Barry: So I started to, those things were really important to me, and especially Studs Terkel's work because it got me at an early age. And also probably coming from a bilingual family. I know I love talking about being Filipino and then seeing people like that confused German Shepherd. Like, she doesn't look Filipino at all, I don't know if that's really true. 

 I always tell people it's because I'm a quarter Norwegian and Norwegian blood can suck the color out of anything. ( laughter ) But I started to especially get interested in the way kids talk and the way kids tell stories, and you know when you start learning about literature and you start to really study anything with this part of your brain right here, you start taking it apart and I had this idea to write a story, whether it's in comic strip form or literature, you had to know about the three act structure and you had to know about the story arc and all this stuff. And it took me a long time to figure out that no, it's the other way around. The only reason we know about that three act stuff it's because we already know how to do it. It's like thinking the only reason we have ribs in a spinal column is because some guy drew ribs in a spinal column in a medical book and then named it and so now we all have it. It's the other way around. So I want to tell you what I think is a perfect comic strip, and it was made by a kid I was sitting next to on an airplane. I'm very, very interested in kids and their objects. To me, when you see a kid walking with a stuffed animal, I actually saw this kid walking through an airport he had had the whole Incredible Hulk's doll but all he had left was the leg. ( laughter ) The leg's all I need, man. 

 ( laughter ) So I got really interested in these because to me those are comic strips too. This is this object that contains something alive. But I learned that I can't just walk up to kids and ask them, can you tell me about your transitional object? ( laughter ) It'd be like somebody walking up to me and going can you tell me about your bra? I got five minutes. So I realized that the way I can talk to kids is just start drawing around them. Perfect set up. I'm near the window. This kid Jack, he must have been about seven or eight, next to me and then his mom who puts in her iPod and goes to sleep. So Jack has like this Transformer sticker book that he's playing with so I start drawing. He looks over. I'm a cartoonist, he believes me. 

 ( laughter ) So I play this game with him that actually got me through math when I was growing up. Which is you do a scribble and then you give it to your friend, and they have to turn that scribble into a picture. And then they do a scribble and pass it back. You all have probably done that. So I start doing it. If you do that with a kid you're going to get a story. So I ask him if he wants to play this scribble game. We do it. We get three passes and all of a sudden he goes, oh, I have a story, and you can make a comic strip about it. And you can tell he didn't know what the hell the story was, he just had this feeling of like, I have a story! Which is what most people think creative people are like. 

 It's like. . . ( laughter ) I wish it was true, man. ( laughter ) So he goes, and the kid's name is Jack, he goes, the title is Chicken Attack by Jack. And he goes, you can make a comic strip out of it. And I said okay. And I did because it was the perfect comic strip. And I'll say it to you verbatim, and you can make the strip part in your mind. This is Chicken Attack by Jack. 

 First draft. One morning a chicken was eaten by a man. The man went to work. His stomach started to feel funny. He went to the port-o-let and then he went. ( laughter ) The chicken came out. The man was surprised. The chicken was also surprised. ( laughter ) The chicken ran from the port-o-let to the construction site. They put the chicken in charge, and from then on the chicken was boss. 

 ( laughter ) ( applause ) So that's first draft. ( laughter ) It came on with this feeling. ( laughter ) And it did make a perfect comic strip. But my feeling is that ability, that ability in stories and the ability to read comics, to me really, I believe, that it's because if you can read a comic and make it come to life, my feeling is you can write a comic and make it come to life. If you can stand your drawing. And if you can't stand your drawing here's the quickest way to get started. When you get home put your hand down on a piece of paper, trace it, draw some little feet, put a beak over here. You know the turkey, right? Little hat. But put a cigarette. ( laughter ) See don't you feel better even just thinking about that? ( laughter ) That's what I'm saying when I say it has an absolute biological function. 

 I think it's about feeling better, and sometimes the way to feel better is to feel really, really bad. So I wanted to say that. And then it's almost time to go to our questions but wait I just, oh, I wanted to tell you about characters because people ask me where I get my characters. And I had this big revelation, unfortunately it was at a renaissance fair. Have you ever been to one of those? If you haven't been I suggest you go just to see how other people are living. ( laughter ) You can't even imagine. They love to eat big turkey legs. And wenches have this all pushed up. But one of the things I saw when I was at a renaissance fair was these two theatre guys who had memorized a great deal of Shakespeare, and what they did was they would make this big announcement that the Globe Theatre was about to start and they did garbage Shakespeare. And so they kind of just indicated this area, it was like in the middle of a road. 

 And this guy picked up a cigarette butt and the other one had a bottle cap. And they did Romeo and Juliet. And we watched it like, damn how's this going to come out. ( laughter ) It was just something about wiggling that bottle cap and wiggling that cigarette butt, and we watched them like they were characters because we can't help it, that's how we work. You know about how you have an extra hard drive, you know this whole thing with you have an extra hard drive? I think of comics as being like a hard drive. Or art as being this extra living space. And when you think about a comic or you think about our problem of having our insides that no one can ever really see or feel and then the outside world, art is that transitional thing. And comics are that transitional thing. And when you think about comics, for instance let's say Snoopy, you all know who Snoopy is, right? Where the hell is Snoopy? Where is Snoopy? Snoopy's in the image world, and Batman's there and Scrooge is there and even Cathy is there. ( laughter ) Even if you run after her with bug spray, she is still there in the image world. 

 So I think about this huge image world that people have invented, we've invented and this idea that art or comics or something is like an elective or decoration I think is one of the craziest, remember that term junk DNA? About the most arrogant term I've ever heard in my life. Don't know what it is so it must be junk. That's how I feel about art and comics, that it's something much more than something to think about or I don't know about you and no offense but museums and galleries really freak me out and they feel like intensive care units to me. Somebody's dying, everything's really expensive. We have to be quiet. ( laughter ) I don't know what I think. ( laughter ) In fact, for me to tell what I think about a piece of art I have to imagine it in the muffler station or a gas station then I can, alright. Next to the you want it when sign. ( laughter ) So characters come from messing around. They come from wiggling a bottle cap or He-Man's leg. 

 And one night I was laying in bed after I had my characters, my comic strip is 30 years old so when I was laying in bed one night, I had quite a few, I was laying there and I realized I was never going to meet them in real life, and I started crying because it was the saddest thing I could think of then I just realized no, I'm just really drunk. ( laughter ) It's not that sad. ( laughter ) So I think that that's, did I have anything else that I was really going to tell you? Nope, I think that was it. So I guess we can open the floor up to questions. Buhle: We must take questions now. Barry: Let's take some questions. No one came prepared? ( laughter ) I had a teacher who would always make this face after she'd say something like questions and nobody would raise their hand and she'd go. . . ( laughter ) Buhle: So please, ask. 

 What do you have against Garfield? Barry: Against what? Garfield. Barry: What do I have against Garfield? And you know that's a good question. Like what do I have against Cathy, right? Garfield pissed me off when I was a kid and it's not even any kind of logical thing, it's just sort of like hating the color orange. But he pissed me off. He was like lazy and mean and I didn't like his eyes. ( laughter ) And Petey was popular. To hell with that, man. Because there's that whole thing with coolness too. I hated Garfield because it was uncool. But of course I loved Family Circus. 

 I'll beat the bleep out of someone if they talk about Family Circus, but then I'll beat the bleep out of someone if they tell me they love Garfield. So it doesn't have anything to do with thinking deeply. ( laughter ) Someone else? Yes, somebody else here. Cruddy was one of the most enjoyable, hideous books I've ever read. And I wondered, because I knew -- comic and I loved it and then one day I was in the book store I went, oh, a book and I grabbed it, and I could not believe what I was reading. ( inaudible ) It's horror. It's horror. Barry: That's actually, people in my community when they ask me what kind of books I write, I always say horror because I know that's the look they'd had on their face if they saw my work. ( laughter ) How was that for you to write this as opposed to writing this comic strip, and do you ever think of doing a graphic novel? And what ever happened to, is there going to be a sequel to Cruddy? Barry: Well, Cruddy, here's the thing about Cruddy, and I'm glad that you asked that, I had written, the first novel I ever wrote was very short like a novelini, and I wrote it by hand and I wrote it using a very specific word. And I wrote it in 10 days and I remember afterwards going damn, I better not get in this mood too often there will be novels all over the house. 

 ( laughter ) But the next one took me 10 years, it took me 10 years. And the reason, I finally figured out why it took me 10 years was I was trying to write it on a computer which has a delete button. Which if I had on my own life I'd have like 27 minutes, maybe. ( laughter ) But I was somebody who, and I'm really interested in, actually there are studies about it, about our hands. Here's the original digital age, right here. Digits, whoa. Wireless, whoa. ( laughter ) Just feed her. And so, what were we talking about though? ( laughter ) I remember, I remember, I remember. So what happened was I found myself in my studio after 10, and it also was going to be a book with an uplifting purpose for society which is step one to never getting anywhere, step on to the cul-de-sac. 

 And so I was walking around my studio one day literally saying this if I was doing this how would I do it? If it was me writing this novel. And it was like who else is there. And when I thought about when I was a kid because that over and over again has gotten me out of jams. How would I do it if I were a kid? Well the first thing that occurred to me is I would never think about writing a book without making the book first that you're going to write it in. Remember construction paper and you take a couple, three staples and there's your book. As soon as I did that I already felt ahead of the game because I was feeling better. I even liked saying construction paper because I see people go like this. Like if you go copier paper. Construction paper. ( laughter ) And then I thought maybe I was too fast with the computer. 

 What's the slowest possible way you could write a book and it was with a paint brush. And also I was painting the book so what I had to do was almost paint the book. Like if I did it like this on the computer I didn't know where it was or what it was. So I painted that book, Cruddy, with a paint brush. And what I found out while I was doing this very pretty handwriting because I thought if this goes to bleep I can get a job decorating cakes. ( laughter ) Please. And what happened was when I drew it this entirely different, I thought that I was like this person who could cure vampires with our magical hippy love. Stated George W. Bush, you just need to party in the sun, man. ( laughter ) But what happened when I started using my hand, if you watch people talk they have a very hard time talking without using their hands and hands and thinking in the back of the mind are really connected. 

 So this entirely different horrifying blood-filled knife and I loved every minute of it. In fact, I realized I could just paint in what looked like dried blood when nobody else was watching. So that's how Cruddy, but I actually had to make the book. And the book that I'm working on now that's what I realized is that it's doing stuff by hand. And what it is, one of the saddest things about what's happening to comics is people are doing lettering that's on the computer because it's easier, right? But if you think about handwriting, which is drawing, you all if you're worrying about not being able to draw, if you can draw the alphabet, that's drawing. And what happens is when you're drawing by hand a B that's next to an O looks completely different than a B that's next to an I. There's all this spatial relationship going on. There's all kind of stuff about writing by hand. And handwriting looks like talking. I think that's one of reasons why we don't see the bubbles in typeface. 

 So that's one of the saddest things is all the computer stuff that's happening. Because I feel, I just feel sad for young people who just, their whole, they have to sit and do like this and it's like having your whole world but you can only see it through a window this big. So where was that going? Don't use the computer, it's bad. ( laughter ) Buhle: That's funny. Barry: I want to know, Paul, what was the first stuff that you saw that got you hooked? Buhle: Gosh. Barry: I mean early. Buhle: My sisters, who were four years younger than me, they set out to teach me to read by showing me comics. And that was really great but when they traded my best comics, like Donald Duck for western comics, I remember my sister did that, I got very, very upset. It was a bad moment, a bad family moment. Barry: That is a jarring shift. 

 Buhle: It was, but within months I discovered Wonder Woman. And it was my first sexual moment in my, I was very young for that but Wonder Woman did it for a lot of males in my generation and perhaps a number of females as well. And there I knew. There was my solace in the pages of comic books, and of course they were the first books we were ever allowed to purchase even though on an allowance. The first things we ever stacked neatly. I stacked them terribly. And maybe most important the first ones that I, and among the last for a very long time, that I ever read repeatedly. Over and over and over again. Such that when I learned like 40 years later that this old Bolshevik lady in New York who had been blacklisted in the '50s had scripted various classic illustrated comics, we always call it classic comics, like William Tell would be a favorite of hers or Mark Twain, I realized how these, this message had gotten through to me through all of these forms. And it was like remembering seeing Mad comics for the first time deconstructing advertising, deconstructing American politics and so forth and so forth. 

 It had to go through all those forms, mostly from New York, to get all the way to me in the middle of Illinois in a Rock River republican county. But it did get to me, thanks to comic art. And it couldn't come any other way. Barry: That's one of the cool things is how images travel. And they travel through time too. They travel through time. Buhle: Yeah. Barry: And they travel intact. How about you? Danky: I remember the comics cost a dime because you're a little older than me but I remember like 12-cents on Dell comics. Buhle: Seemed high. 

 ( laughter ) Danky: It did. I see you're price sensitive. It was a big day when they went up from a dime to 12-cents. Buhle: It was. Danky: And they weren't sealed in plastic bags because they didn't have naughty content in the Safeway supermarket. But you could sit there and while your mother was shopping, it was always the mother, and in the time it took her to do that, that's why I became a fast reader. I could read comics because I'd read the ones that were more marginal interest. Let's face it, you can read Superman quite rapidly. It doesn't really require too much pondering, at least in the '50s. But then I'd save my money, because I could buy one comic book. 

 So I'd buy Uncle Scrooge or something like that. Barry: You guys like the ducks, both of you. Buhle: Seemingly so. He was big. Danky: I wanted to be rich. Oh, that. Danky: That's why I became a librarian. ( laughter ) Buhle: My first paper back book was a Pogo collection and boy did that mean a lot to me. Walt Kelly was so wise. Barry: Well, I think one of the reasons we can read them over is because comics are like music. 

 They remind me more, people always compare them to movies, but to me they're more like songs that you can listen to. I'd like to talk about a comic that disturbed the hell out of me. Some of you may know it. It was in Playboy. It was that granny who had the really long #######. You know what I'm talking about? That scared, I was little and it was like, it scared me so bad, and that was the other thing is I didn't know comics could scare you. Who was it, a friend of mine saw his first Zap when he was 12 and he was so flipped out about what to do with it, he didn't feel like there was any safe place to hide it. He buried it. ( laughter ) He buried it in his yard. That's how alive these things could be. 

 ( laughter ) What were you doing reading Playboy as a kid? Barry: What every other kid was doing reading Playboy. Just the articles. ( laughter ) Danky: Never the photos. Barry: Oh, the other one, Little Annie Fanny. Who did Little Annie Fanny? Buhle: Harvey Kurtzman. Barry: That one scared me too. It wasn't so much that she was so buxom, it was that she looked crazy. She looked like she was going to hit walls when she walked and wouldn't know what to eat. I was worried for her. Buhle: Rightly so. 

 Danky: She did look dangerous. Can you talk a little bit about your wind farm comic concept and where that's going. Barry: Okay, I'll just do this really briefly. I have the most unpopular job in the Midwest right now, and I chose it myself which is I'm an advocate for people who are living in industrial wind farms in our state. And what's happening is yes, we want renewable energy and right on we do, but right now the wind developers are getting away with putting 40-story turbines 500 feet or a thousand feet from people's homes. And it turns out that they make a lot of noise at night, and people are having a hard time and no one's believing them. Or anybody who's having this trouble are called a NIMBY. I've been called all these names for trying to get this issue up. My favorite is wind jihadists. ( laughter ) But what's started to happen is these people aren't being believed. 

 They're being completely ridiculed, if you attended any of the hearings. And I would hear them say over and over again when they're testifying, please come to my house and spend the night so that you can see. So I thought okay, I will. So I'd say, I'll come stay at your house; I'm a cartoonist. They don't care. They're so desperate they'll let a cartoonist come stay at their house. ( laughter ) So I have, I've interviewed people from 20 households in two different wind farms in the Blue Sky Green Field Wind Farm near the town of Marshfield and the We Energy Wind Farm near the town of Byron, and I've spent the nights in their homes and I've made comic strips about it. Because it turns out that if you want to get a legislator's attention, if you walk in with a page that says these people are having this much trouble and here's what's happening and this is what happens when you have uninterrupted sleep. If you hand them that they just put it aside. If you hand them a comic strip they can't help but read it. 

 ( laughter ) They can't help but read it. And that was a revelation to me. Because I thought when I walk in it's like I'm a cartoonist and I'm the one who's doing research. I thought they would laugh me. But it was before I would even stop talking they were like I will read comics. ( laughter ) That was a really good thing, and it was a revelation for me. So that's my little thing. It was the dumbest, the thing is when you try to talk about the downside of wind energy it's like you're legislating against speckled fawns. ( laughter ) But there are downsides. And just one last thing I'd like to say is the bat mortality in the Blue Sky Green Field Project is really high. 

 And that's another thing that people don't know. Bats, it's not that they fly into the turbines, the wake behind them is so powerful that when the bats fly through, their lungs explode. They get the bends and bats are slow to reproduce. They live like 30 years and they're tight family groups. So like anything else, huge industrial wind turbines have a downside that they're right on if they can put them in the right place. So that's that. There were a thing on NPR recently about how when there's not very much wind they can just stop the turbines. Barry: They can. ( inaudible ) Barry: They can stop them. They can also stop them when they're causing terrible shadow flicker on people's homes, that's the other thing. 

 But they don't stop them. And they won't stop them. It's called curtailment and the developers right now are really getting away with a lot. And until the National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, on the national level they're not doing anything but luckily the local chapters are finally starting to speak out and say I know the most wind are migration corridors. Have you seen the letters to the editor in the Isthmus after that? I was really disappointed in that. Barry: What, about how like people are. . . ? They're totally afraid and they can't see there's any problems with it. Barry: I know. 

 And people think the turbines are gently lowered quietly in your field with a bag of money right next to it. ( laughter ) But they have downsides. They're, giant, giant, giant, giant, giant machines. And conservation and efficiency still kicks ass beyond ass. Green ass. ( laughter ) I'm like a kid with Asperger's. Don't bring up dinosaurs around Billy. ( laughter ) You bring wind turbines up around me and I'm like oh, oh. ( laughter ) It's true. Barry: So I'll stop talking about that but anybody who wants to talk about it I'd love to talk about it. 

 This is from -- in France. I spent, between when I was two and six I lived in France with my parents, of course, but I got introduced to Tin Tin and my mother was --. She thought comics were basically trash but Tin Tin was okay because she wanted us to learn to read French. So that was okay. So when we came back to the United States I was really -- they were trash by comparison. Is Tin Tin considered kind of like, I mean where is --? Barry: You know, I think, for me in my mind, I even forget it's a comic in a way. It seems like a children's book. It's kind of like Dr. Seuss but for older readers. But it is a comic and there's a tradition in Europe of looking at comics like books like anything else. 

 The quality of the paper in American comics, the color is just all washed out. Barry: Tin Tin was hardbound, right? You had hardbound books? Yeah. I was so upset when American or English editions came out and the dog. . . (INAUDIBLE) Who makes those kind of changes? Barry: It should be Barfy. (laughter) Oh, by the way I did find out how Barfy got his name. Once I stopped crying, I needed to ask Jeff, Jeffy. Jeffy. Barry: And I was really bummed out. 

 I don't know if I want to even tell you. So I said, Jeffy, the Barfy thing. I know, that's the clue, right, that the literature hippy in me is following a little fish upstream to where I spawned, explain to me Barfy was like the thing. . . And he goes, no, that was Dolly, his sister, couldn't say, they had a dog named Barky, and she couldn't say Barky, she called him Barfy. That's his story. Barry: Yeah, Bill figured out Barfy. That's his story. Other questions? I have to apologize because when I came here I had no clue who any of you were, (laughter) Barry: Happens to me all the time at the Piggly Wiggly. 

 (laughter) Don't you know who I think I am? (laughter) I have to say that, because I don't even feel like I have the right to speak. Speak. But my children couldn't read worth a darn, got them comics, they could read. I got them the little books you were talking about, like Mark Twain all the things with reading on one side and drawing on the other, and they read through that, and now they're wonderful readers. I had no respect for comics until I came here, except for last year, there was a contest, and if you wanted to win so much money in order to have this home makeover so rather than do out the fill out the blank, I did a comic. Well, I have no artistic talent whatsoever. And I love this turkey thing. But it was my dog and my cat. And they were talking about how our house is really boring, I wish I could do something new. And I sent it in. 

 Well, I didn't win. ( laughter ) ( inaudible ) She got all these letters, sad and funny. And she finally, just drew one out of the pot and it didn't really matter. And she called me and said she loved it, and that was good, but I haven't drawn anything since. Barry: You should. I know. Barry: You're right, everybody does know they should. I should clean too. ( laughter ) Long story short. How do I, is there a prison comic? Barry: A prison comic? Yes. 

 Buhle: Yes, there's a wonderful, what's it's called? Real Life in Prison, or Real Prison Life. One way to access it is one of the main artists for it, a collaborator of mine, Sabrina Jones, and her Web site is Sabrinaland. "Real Cost of Prisons" is the name of this comic. And it's an ongoing series online and it's really, really great. Her name is Sabrina? Buhle: Sabrina Jones. And it's Sabrinaland? Buhle: That's her Web site. She's not the only artist, but she's one of the artists. (inaudible) Buhle: I think so. I know one of the artists for that on the Web site is a prisoner. That's the only one I know, but maybe there's more. 

 There's a lot. Buhle: Then that's the site to go to. "Real Cost of Prisons. " Barry: Do we have time for one more question? Buhle: So it seems. It's a question for Mr. Danky. I wanted to know in the underground comics, who started publishing them, and how did they come up with the money, and how did they make that happen in a way? Buhle: Can I offer and footnote first here, and then I'll pass it on? Danky: You can, yes. Buhle: Here's the way Radical America comics happened. It was the third underground comic to appear. Danky: In the whole country. 

 Buhle: In the whole country, that's exactly right. A left wing foundation whose money was based on bra snaps, but the patent was expiring for years, it was like the end of his foundation. ( laughter ) I published this magazine. They gave me $2,000 sort of on false pretenses that it was going to be more intellectual stuff produced. And I gave that money to Gilbert Shelton who was going from Washington to San Francisco and produced a comic called "Feds 'N' Heads" about acid heads who had a good time, and so forth in Austin, Texas. So he and two other people, he had $2,000 and two other people each had $2,000, and between the three of them they founded Rip Off Press. Radical America comics, formally published, though not edited, and written in Madison, sold about 30,000 comics, and they had enough money to then print more comics. And this is 1969. And by 1971, sometimes the print runs were 50,000. They cost a dollar. 

 And people were crazy about them in a counterculture, and they were in every head shop in the country, and there were plenty of head shops, and other kinds of places. And to finish off my little section of it, that so many of these trips appeared in underground newspapers, which were all around the country. A subject that Jim knows more about than almost anybody, probably. That brought people's attention to going to find those comics. And it was a phenomenon in comics, because they weren't essentially commercial at all. They were all self-created. They had no censorship, and people didn't plan to make any money, and they made very little money, but some money. And rent was $50 a month, so you could get by. And they just sort of went from there. We'd never done anything like that before, and never anything like that since. 

 But by gosh, I'm glad I saw it happen and got to be a little part of it. Danky: Great question. I talked about the sort of aesthetic liberation of artists in the '60s, but it was also economic liberation that, as Paul indicated, that initially and continuing for most, there was no economic incentive. But it's the very first time that comic artists actually control their own work. Prior to that, it's a real assembly line. If you look at any of the superhero things, it's a whole-- When they're fully listed, it's a whole list of people who'd done the inking and lettering. Buhle: They didn't copyright. Underground comics artists copyrighted their work. Danky: Artists really benefited our show when we went to do it, because the artists indeed ended up controlling, physically, their own work. And that's probably the most important legacy for the next generation of artists like Lynda who in the sense that they actually have their own work. 

 Whereas, even somebody who is very famous like Charles Schultz, a lot of his stuff was just thrown away by the printers when it was done. I'm not that wild about Peanuts myself, but I'm sure that it's, I wouldn't throw it away. I'd make sure it was kept. So it's the first time that artists get to control their work. It was one time use, etc. , through reprinting and they got their work back. And comic artists would do as artists have always done, and that's to trade work with each other, and that's how our friend and collaborator Denis got his collection. He traded his art, or purchased art from artists whose work he published. And that's a terrific break from the serf system that had preceded them. Buhle: A lot of great comic work got published up in Princeton, Wisconsin. 

 A lot of great comic work within a period of 10 years. Just astonishing. Both in new stuff like gay comics mentioned, but also in archival material. You couldn't find any comic of the past that was really great, except maybe Krazy Kat, in bound volumes in 1970. By 1990, Denis, more than anybody else, had put all kinds of just fabulous comic talent from the 1920s to the 1950s, some of whose stuff politically I just despised-- Never mind-- As comic art. Now by that time an archive existed, and anybody can look at that and make sense of it themselves. That's a real big difference, and it belongs to the surge that came out of underground comics. Danky: And the pattern that Denis did in reprinting Al Capp and many, many other artists has now been-- Denis doesn't publish any longer, it's been passed on to Lynda's publisher, Drawn and Quarterly where "Gasoline Alley" is appearing as a really deluxe series of bound volumes. And I'd have to say that that was an idea that I could never have ever imagined before seeing it. Barry: So the concluding statement is this-- Oh, what? (INAUDIBLE) So the concluding statement is this: When it comes to comics, Bucky's got balls. 

 ( laughter ) Bucky's got balls, and he cannot lie. So I hope you feel really proud about Bucky's comics balls. Balls spelled with an X. ( laughter ) And I want to thank you all for coming. We all got to look at each other on the first day of snow. And do go home and draw. If you have a kid around, you can pretend you're doing it just to show them how. But go ahead and do that, and draw that cigarette, and then write something about someone you hate. And then throw it away, and you'll feel better. Thank you, very much. 

 ( applause )