Jeremy and beyond - an interview with Jonathan Morris

Nominated for an Ignatz Award in 2001 and one of the funniest, most richly illustrated, touching comics available on or offline, the strip Jeremy is now available for purchase. If you managed to miss the strip, it was the creation of Jonathan Morris, also known by comics fans as the creator of the surreally brilliant Gone and Forgotten, often described as a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 for comic books by people who are very unimaginative bloggers.

Much like webcomics such as Cigarro & Cerveza, Jeremy is a strip that gained a great deal of critical acclaim, and its collection deserves a serious review. Jon was kind enough to talk to me about Jeremy, comics in general, Mel Gibson's perceptions of non-linear time, and Doctor Doom crying.

Matt: So, you know I think Jeremy is one of the most consistently funny and at times touching strips out there. Why did you originally decide on the concept of a kid Frankenstein's monster?

Jon: The original Jeremy story - which never ended up in the strips, although I did it as a short for the "Thing With Four Heads" minicomic - was actually about a kid who was stealing chocolate milk from a supermarket, AND making a big production out of it (because, implicitly, his acting out was about more than wanting chocolate milk, I suppose). It occurred to me that, to get across the idea that there was a lot more at stake in his theft than just getting something to drink, I should give him something visual to indicate that he had good reasons for putting so much emphasis on the milk ... I don't know, I may actually have gone the other way, wondering what a Frankenstein's Monster boy might do by way of acting out, being a big fan of the original novel and all that. Either way, making him a wretched, monstrous zombie type added visual layers to the psychology of the scene. (PS - I literally thought almost none of this at the time)

M: I don't want to ask the typical 'what are your influences' question, so let me ask you, is there anything you ever did in the strip, either visually or in the writing, that you ever looked at later and thought was particularly notable or well-done? Favorite strips or moments that come to mind?

J: Having a chance to read all the strips in a single sitting, by way of the book, there are bits that really stick out. Just so I'm not naming a thousand of them, the four-parter where the kids perform Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein is my favorite bit.

M:Yes, that's one of my favorites, especially Sara in it.

J: It's her shining moment.

M:I have to fight the urge to just gush about the strip and come up with reasonable questions about it... is it hard keeping the characters balanced the way you have? Even Sara is likable, Jeremy himself is an excellent example of a really good at heart kid who kind of goes off his rocker from time to time, Everett comes off as being more into the mayhem then he lets on, even Dr. Frankenstein seems to genuinely care about his kid... how much do you think about balancing the characters off of each other?

J: I don't think I think about it all that conciously - I like the characters to be likeable, and to effectively like each other (they probably would just avoid one another if it weren't the case), but obviously you can't have much of a story without the conflict, so I have to pit them against each other a little. What's nice is that, for all the rampaging, Jeremy is a very quiet, utterly non-bombastic comic strip, and I have the luxury of giving the characters very mild personality conflicts, the kind of .. things you might actually experience with friends. I'm thinking particularly of one episode where Jeremy and Rebecca are playing a board game at Jeremy's house, and he sort of off-handedly mentions that the horrifying ghosts who haunt his house probably won't kill him, not really considering how that'd make Rebecca feel. Which is a small conflict, but it's tense enough for a joke. I don't think there's a villain anywhere to be had in the strip; I hadn't thought about it in those terms before, but even Ms. Solomon is more put-upon than evil or cruel ...

M: Which reminds me of the evil toys storyline near the beginning of the strip and how the evil toys were less a menace but a nuisance to Jeremy, and it was through the other kids that we got a sense of the menace Or how Jeremy casually remembers seeing Ms. Solomon in one of the mobs that chased him

J: Ha, sure, Jeremy's used to this sort of stuff. He lives in a house full of it.

M: I remember discovering the strip in 1999 - 2000, and watching you really expand the art and layout of the strip from a three or four panel rectangle to, eventually, whole pages - were you thinking of moving the strip to a paper publication or just experimenting with it, and have you ever settled on a format you feel is the best showcase for it? Or are you just enjoying playing with design? The layouts have become some of my favorite aspects of the strip, so I'm wondering how important they are to you as you work on it.

J: The first few Jeremy strips - and these are the first twelve I did in 1997, and which were frankly so godawful that I'm never showing them again - were done as a submission to local newspapers, student papers, free weeklies, etc. So when I started doing the strip weekly online, I stuck with the horizontal format either out of habit or because I STILL thought I could get it into papers, i can't recall. Going full page was simply because I was getting tired of cramming all that dialogue and art into such small frames. You might notice the old strips would have five or six panels in a single line, but the full pagers usually had only three ... I should mention, though, that I'm angling to do larger and larger stories now with Jeremy, and I probably won't be going back to the single page strip format (except in one case, where I was specifically asked)

M: Wow, I haven't asked you about yourself at all.

J: So who would want to?

M: Thus proving I'm not good at conversation or interviewing... pretend I insightfully asked you for some notable details of your life, and feel free to throw some out there.

J:You know this is just going to turn into "fat drunk" jokes.

M: At least they'll be funny fat drunk jokes.

J: Here, I'll give you an utter tangent which I think you ought to appreciate. Once I was done cooking all this up in my noggin, I actually thought you'd find it particularly interesting. Also, Forgive me as I get off on a tangent. But I have a trigonometry fetish. ANYWAY...

M: No problem, go for it.

J: Okay, so, I woke up a few mornings ago thinking about how time itself is not a linear progression of ordered events but rather a cogent, coherent simultaneous space in which every moment is essentially identical; i.e. your thirtieth birthday is the same moment as your tenth birthday, and every moment therein is an identical yet distinct, inseparable moment. You know, basic Brief History of Time stuff. tAnd I was furthermore thinking about how interesting it is that we can imagine a state of perception wherein we do not experience time linear..ally...ish, AND YET we cannot actually perceive an imaginative state. And what got me thinking about this was remember when Mel Gibson got pulled over for a DUI and he called that lady cop "Sugartits?"

M: I didn't know he called her Sugartits, actually, I just knew he went off on a tirade. It's a notion I've long entertained, that time consists of an endless moment that simply alters its parameters.

J: Anyway, yeah, he called her "Sugartits" which, yes, I understand it is an insult and I understand why - he's saying that despite the fact the she is an individual human being and a figure of authority that she is actually, in his perception, only there for aesthetic and potentially sexual purposes, and is a lesser human being more similar to an object than a person - but I still think it sounds like something a grateful Leprechaun might call a helpful princess. "As ye've so bravely defended the kingdom of the fair folk from the terrible mountain ogre, I, King of the Leprechauns, hereby dub thee Princess Sugartits!"

M: See, if Mel Gibson had a comical Irish accent, that sound clip would have gotten on TV a lot more

J: And then she's standing on the parapet of her kingdom, the sun shining through the sugar crystals on her bosom, the crowd of serfs and peasants shouting her name in celebration. It would've been in my head earlier, probably, yeah! (I say all this because Sugartits sounds like a brand of Sugar Cookies to me, and I like Sugar Cookies, because they are soft and warm, like tits. BUT I DIGRESS) PS JEREMY IS AN ALL AGES COMIC, HERE I TALK MORE ABOUT TITS SO

M: Yeah, but now I'm going to be able to have "I like sugar cookies because they are soft and warm, like tits" as the pull quote on the article.

J: Please, be my guest!

M: People will think it's an interview with Stan Lee 'Striperella is soft and warm, like tits!"

J: God, can you just imagine him saying that? I'm getting chills.

M: Thanks to Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, I can imagine Stan Lee saying almost anything

J: I wanna hear Stan belt out Nessun Dorma in that voice of his. I'm pretty sure I'm losing my train of thought.

M: "Face Front, True Believers! Il Nome suo nessum sapra, excelsior!"

J: OH YEAH. Latin! Good segue! What connects these two thoughts for me is that Mel Gibson is a lifelong Catholic, and he's been in a social construction from an early age where much of his spiritual life - the unseen, incalcuable portion of his life - is overseen and guided by a strictly ordained cast of authority figures. I'm gonna finish this, I promise! Then I'll do character design, I promise also And despite the position of metaphysical authority these folks have placed in them, THEY DIDN'T SEE THIS COMING. Like, if anyone on Earth is going to be able to perceive time as an absolute, static construction, you'd think it'd be a priest or a pastor or a reverend. I myself was baptized and christened in the Lutheran church, and I'm sort of surprised my pastor didn't see this coming. "In the name of the Father and the Son, I christen thee Jonathan Randall Morris, and it's a damn good thing this is holy water and not Twinkies and whiskey, or this kid would finish the whole thing." "Haha, no, I kid, don't worry - at least he'll be able to make fun of comic books."

M: Even if they saw it coming, they wouldn't care

J: So we can imagine a state or perception, but cannot perceive that imagined state, which led me to consider the difference between practical and impractical imagination - saying, for instance, one of our primitive ancestors trying to get some apples from high up in a tree might employ practical imagination in order to build a ladder, maybe, while his impractical imagination was thinking "If only I could jump super high like forty feet awesome" But then again, impractical imagination (say "There is an invisible magic man in space who will let me live in his gold-plated ice cream parlor when I die if I am good") quickly becomes practical imagination (say having the above sentiment pretty much universally grokked at face value) pretty damn quick, so I don't see why we can't perceive time as cogent. And also I picture Mel's confirmation pastor chuckling "Sugartits, good one Mel." "What, sir?" "Save it for a couple decades, kid." Now I am done.

M: Okay, character design, hit me.

J: Gotcha, well, like I say, I'm a big fan of the original book. I'm also a fan of ... most ... of the Frankenstein movies, but I knew flat out that I wasn't interested in designing a green skinned, flat-headed Frankenstein boy; too much baggage carried by a new reader coming into the strip (Although it is worth mentioning that, at the same time Jeremy debuted, there was another webcomic strip called Frankenstudent, created by a Tony Morris, who did indeed resemble the movie monster) So i wanted him to be a piecemeal construct of mismatched body parts. The one big eye was probably the most dominant design element on the entire character, and it was an excellent expressive tool. I remember too that it took me something like a year before I realized I could have his lips stitched AND he could open his mouth. I went through a lot of hassles to give him decent expressions with his mouth sewn shut before I stumbled across that better idea.

M: Okay, but what about the other characters? Sara and Rebecca are just human, but you did an excellent job in making them incredibly different looking in a field where most artists draw the same face on everyone they do.

J: I hate to diminish my accomplishments, but it helps that Chad's got glasses and is white, and that Rebecca and Sara are different ages and have distinctly different hairdos. That's an old Mad Peck (underground cartoonist) tip; Give all your characters distinctive hats! The one thing I liked about the human characters - and I didn't notice it until someone else pointed it out - was that while they were drawn very cartoony, they were pretty human-looking, particularly compared to Jeremy. Other strips with freaky lead characters usually have freaky looking supporting casts, too...

M: Okay, for a second I'm going to ask you to get mean, because it just occurred to me how to ask about influences - who are the greatest negative influences on you? What artists have caused you to sit back and try deliberately NOT to draw like that?

J: Jhonen Vasquez and Roman Dirge.

M: Forgive me, but I honestly can't tell the difference between their art styles enough - what in particular don't you want to do that they do?

J: Because I am SURE they are very nice men - I've read Dirge's blog, and he's very smart and charming - but readers have been comparing Jeremy to JTHM and Lenore since day one, and it's always frustrated me. In both cases - though Vasquez more than Dirge - what they create is a consistent palette across their characters' worlds. And that works for what they do, which are very often twisted takes on everyday common constructs, but not what I would want to do with Jeremy. For Vasquez, as a for instance ... Every building, every street, tree, article of clothing, etc, is drawn with the same shocking, sharp, thick understructure and rendering as his character "Nny," including hapless babies and cuddly dolls. To me, that means we're not really reading a story about a character as much as we're reading a story about a really messed up world.

M: I'm ashamed to admit I haven't read any of Vasquez' work in years So I have little familiarity with it

J: Which again is fine for the stories they're telling, but Jeremy is a story about a kid in particular, and the world he's in needs to not conform to his particular look and feel.

M: You mentioned working on larger stories with Jeremy - anything in particular you'd like to do with him, or have thought about doing with him?

J: I have to admit I haven't either, so I might be eight or ten years passed his current style. Dirge I've seen recently (by way of Haunted Mansion), so I think I'm close to describing his modern stuff. Well, I never did get to do one story I was also pondering, where Jeremy's older 'brother' comes home to visit. I've never made bones about Dr.Frankenstein being the same doc who built the monster of the book, even if it's only obliquely referenced (you can see him in some pictures hanging on assorted walls in Jeremy's home), but I think I balked at introducing a character who was not expressly one created for the strip. There were a couple different directions to take that story, and they all seemed too uncomfortable to tackle. (I would probably have gone with the elder Frankenstein monster coming back for Thanksgiving, and he and Dr.Frankenstein essentially have their confrontation on the ice as a form of typical family fireworks. Which, as you can imagine, gets kind of heavy)

M: Let's talk about the comics form in general - be it comic books, newspaper or internet strips, what have you - anything out there now that you'd unabashedly recommend?

J: Well, Hellboy, I never stop recommending that. although I think if you're going to read it and haven't yet, you probably never will. Duncan Fegredo on the art is particularly great. Lemme think, I actually read very little these days. Every now and again a collection comes out which tickles my fancy, and I find out the book it's collecting stopped running two years ago... Jim Rugg did this epic and funny book called Street Angel, which I loan out constantly. I love the character design and general design sense in Jack Staff, and I love the artwork in Rocketo...

M: Feel free to pimp friends or whatever. I've always felt bad that guys like you, Manning or the artist from Cigarro & Cerveza aren't bigger names.

J: I wish Manning were doing comics any more, I think he might be out of the game. I'm actually pretty bad at reading online comics, too, I read Achewood religiously and then I sneak around to Dinosaur Comics once every two weeks, or what have you. Tony Esteves' Cigarro Y Cerveja is terrific, though, I meant everything I ever said about the book (I wrote the many many forewords for the second volume). Tony and I are supposed to work on a book together sometime too, but I'm awful with keeping up with these committments.

M: I wanted to ask you about Popeye because you've mentioned before your fondness for the strip. Not that Jeremy looks anything like it, but I'd have to wonder if you drew inspiration from it. Just in terms of the design of characters like Bag

J: I love the ensemble elements of Popeye, and the line economy style of illustration. Segar did not often waste his black and white spaces. Schulz was more directly what I was thinking of in a lot of the Jeremy designs, tho

M: Speaking of Peanuts, since you're something of a published expert there, how many people do you think respond more to the cartoons and the marketing than to the actual strip? Do you see people missing the point a lot?

J: You almost see nothing but. And it's difficult to address an all-encompassing stand on the issue, because you find yourself walking very close to the same condescending, presumptive path as the folks you're trying to enlighten. You have your folks who instinctively find anything that has acquired some sort of world-wide, status quo acceptance as being necessarily shitty and trite, and you run the risk of being the guy who rails against people who find anything which has garnered general acceptance to be shitty and trite.

M: Not that I'm trying to imply that Jeremy is as well known, but did you worry about that in your own work, be it Jeremy or something else? People just seeing the weird bits and missing a lot of the really touching or profoundly funny material? J: You nailed it with the marketing comment, people are responding to coffee mugs and greeting cards when they dismiss the quality of Schulz's work... Undoubtedly, that's a LOT of what I was seeing in the email (particularly in the early days) where folks were comparing it left and right to Jhonen Vasquez and Roman Dirge. I see where they're seeing the similarities, but excepting black and white illustrations and gallows humor, there's really not a lot in common among our individual outputs...

M: Jeremy's really a much more gentle strip than anything by Vasquez, I'd argue.

J: Yeah, hands down. That was the comparison I disliked the most (no insult intended to Vasquez, of course)

M: Well, it's not even apples and oranges, it's apples and polar bears with switchblades.

J: Har! I see Lenore a little more, I suppose, as Lenore was never a guts-n-gore strip but rather a sort of twisted fairy tale type series of stories ...

M: See, I wish I was a better student of visual art, because the art in Jeremy started good and evolved by your later strips to be almost entirely different while still containing the elements of the characters. Sara comes to mind, her hair became ever more wild and insane but she herself didn't become a caricature... was it just because you were free to experiment with a bigger page, or were you consciously changing the characters? J: I was never very happy with the art in the early strips - refer back to me mentioning that the original twelve strips will never again see the light of day - so I was constantly trying to create something more accomplished with all the characters.

M: Which one were you happiest with? J: And with some of them, particularly Sara as she became a greater foil for Jeremy, I wanted them to have a more iconic look - there's that old character design trick where you determine if you've created an iconic kind of look based on the silhouette. This little tiny body with that crazy hair and eggshaped head rivals Jeremy for a distinct and relatable silhouette... Sara and Bag primarily, they're the ones I kept thinking would work best on tee shirts, after Jeremy. Cat was pretty much screwed, it was all but impossible to make a wet shoebox into something iconic.

M: That's a shame, I loved the strips where you did Cat from Jeremy's perspective.

J: I actually like how Everett started coming out, in the long run. His expressions got better and better, stylistically speaking ... Jeremy all hugging a wet shoebox ... M: So much love in that misshapen body for that wet shoebox.

J: I just wrotre myself into a corner where i could never show Cat, or any part of him, which means I had to share the visual identity of that character with the visual cue for "There are shoes in here"

M: Yeah, the Lovecraft paradox - we're never going to get to see what it looks like, so we imagine it, which then means that no artist can possibly anticipate all the ways it's being imagined.

J: I'm sure I would have disappointed if I'd ever shown what I picture Cat to look like. As a partial hint, if you've ever seen that Three Stooges where Curly tries to eat clam soup, it looks a little like that.

M: Okay, let's talk about one of my favorite strips, the one with Jeremy's 'mom'. In part to get that image out of my head. How'd you get started on that one?

J: Ah, let's see. That would have been around Autumn of 2001 (I can remember this because the final chapter of that storyline came out on sunday following September 11th, which was, you know, a great time to depress everyone)

M: You're ahead of the zeitgeist again.

J: (At least I wasn't one of those horrible webcomics which felt it had to post a memorial strip where all their characters are looking at burning WTCs and crying or something)

M: You could have made millions on T-shirts, though.

J: Jeremy crying in front of the WTC In a Captain America tee shirt.

M: Hey, man, Doctor Doom even cried!

J: Doom should have been throwing a party! What the hell?

M: And that dude's killed how many people?

J: "A plane? Oh, fuck Reed Richards, I've got him NOW!"

M: Man, I'm sidetracking my own interview, but that was so awful. Didn't they even trot out the Kingpin? Why not have Galactus show up and start bawling hytsterically?

J: I love those things, the fan art memorials to the victims of the Trade Center attacks. Captain America crying, Spock and Kirk crying, NEIL GAIMAN'S SANDMAN CRYING Right, we were THIS close to Klaw and the Lizard helping to clean the debris. The Sphinx maybe, "These people are madmen, they do not represent all peoples of Middle Eastern origin!" A full page ad, "The hearts of the Sinister Syndicate go out to everyone affected by these attacks." M: I'd kind of like to see The Enforcers take on this From Ox, Fancy Dan and Mr. Big to you, our hearts are broken by this tragedy

J: What's the name of the villain hangout bar in the Marvel Universe? They probably have a memorial wall up, a corkboard with photos and poems and bits of the Shocker's pants. "In memory of Slyder, who was robbing the WTC mall at 7:30 on the morning of 9/11"

M: Of course, now they're all government employees.

J: So they've got all this up in a break room.

M: It's sad when I find myself thinking that Nova is the sanest guy in that whole mess.

J: Well, we could stand around debating all day which of the steroid freaks in spandex and who can turn steel to butter with a glance is the most reasonable of the lot ...

M: I'd have to go with Stilt-Man I mean, what else WOULD you do with a robotic stilt costume?

J: He's the one who keeps retiring, and then one time tried to steal grease, right? (I have that in a Daredevil issue, so I can remind myself that D G Chichester existed)

M: That is weird, actually, how fast some of these guys come and go. I keep wondering whatever happened to Kieron Dwyer

J: Every now and again he pops up, and I'm always delighted to see him, and then he's suddenly gone again, and Jim Baike is drawing it instead... Anyway, what the heck were we talking about?

M: To try and get back to your comic, and the Mom storyline -

J: Right, right. Well, the Momma storyline is probably full of no surprises whatsoever. My mom had just a month or so earlier been finally properly diagnosed with Early-Onset Alzheimers. We'd had a couple of years where her doctor was insisting that she had suffered a series of micro-strokes, and we'd just gotten the news that she was in fact undergoing what was essentially senility in her fifties. And, unfortunately, she had gone misdiagnosed for so long that by the time we had the proper diagnosis, we were already in the process of losing her,. I was married in October of the previous year, and I remember my mother being so confused by the strangers and the noise and the activity at the wedding. My godmother and mother-in-law were wise enough to pull her away to a corner and keep her occupied with them, so that she didn't become scared by the strangers and the activity... So. I was missing my mother, basically, and trying to come to grips with the idea of losing her completely, which led to Jeremy building and losing a momma in the space of a few weeks.

M: I'm not into psychoanalyzing folks, so I'll just ask if you think part of the reason you started expanding the strip's format related to trying to tell that story in that space of time?

J: No, that decision came a lot earlier, from my frustration with trying to do so much in such small spaces. The first full page strip was a Halloween one, and there must be a half-dozen gags in there alone (Jeremy eating the pupkin and insisting that all things are candy, for intance, I would've normally had to make the only punchline in a single strip format)

M: Man, i wish he was right. I have to eat a lot of things that are not candy.

J: it's all how you look at things.

M: Okay, anything else we want to cover? I do have to actually write this thing at some point.

J: Ha, no, I think we covered a lot. If there's anything else you wanna tackle, lemme know, even if it's through email.

M: Lots of stuff I would probably ask, especially once I have the book itself, but for now I think we're good.

J: Okay man, thanks, this was fun!

M: I'd love to talk to you about Peanuts for like a week, for example

J: Ha, well, anytime. I think I shot my Peanuts wad with the High Hat though.

M: Wait, I'm going to go for the cheesy - I didn't ask about influences, but I will ask you this much. What cartoonists work do you just plain enjoy? Who will you go out of your way to read or reread, who do you still find yourself going back to over the years?

J: Oooh, well, Schulz and Segar of course, also McCay. Billy DeBeck, quite a bit, and I wish someone would get around to reprinting Barney Google. Swan, Eisner, and for all his limitations, Joe Shuster. Beck, Morton, Elias ... those're my old guys. Kirby, of course. Then from the new batch, I like the fellow doing Mutts, and Get Fuzzy. Paul Grist, Mignola, this French artist named Claire Wendling... Rude, still continues to amaze ...

M: Is he still doing comics? Last I saw of him was a Hulk/Superman book he drew. I was a big Baron fan back in the day so I mainly know Rude though Nexus, of course.

J: Yeah, he's back to doing the Moth. Even if he just did sketchbooks for the rest of his life, I could live with that, it's always beautiful stuff. Oh, I should mention Ben Caldwell and Bret Blevins, two other guys whose sketchbooks I always pick up

I'd like to thank Jon for agreeing to talk to me about his work on Jeremy and other subjects.

Posted by Matt Rossi at June 14, 2007 4:09 PM