Your upcoming comicbook Punk Rock Comics - in a few words
what is it about?
Well, I could have called it "Sandez Rey's Universe", because
in essence this is an anthology title that gives every character I've ever
used in alternative and underground comics a chance for a turn in the sun.
Each 24 page issue is divided into three 8 page chapters and each chapter
is essentially a story unto itself as well as being a chapter in the
larger story. The larger story uses the Kaiju (giant monster) genre
to talk about the end of the world. In the first issue El Hijo del
Cthulhu (the Son of Cthulhu) comes out of the Pacific ocean on page one
and attacks Minneapolis (which has been relocated to California as part
of an NBA basketball trade...). El Hijo del Cthulhu is only the
vanguard of a veritable legion of monsters both large and small who will
be appearing in this book. As for the title, Punk Rock Comics it is
simply the best description of everything that I am doing in this book
that I could think of. I have wide ranging musical tastes but
will always have a special affection for punk which is both the music of
my teenage years as an original '70s punk and a category I still go out to
see and enjoy. In fact I was dead front at a club show last night
featuring The Vibrators, a classic British punk act from way back and 2
other bands. I want this comic to be the most psychotronic comic
ever produced, with more monsters, more boobs, more superheroes, more
gunfights, more jokes, more, more, more, more! And that goal leads me
directly to the title which only seems incongruous until you read the
comic, then I think it will make perfect sense to you! You currently run a fundraiser for
your book, right? So what can you tell us about your fundraising efforts,
and what will the money be used for?
|
I'm running a
Kickstarter campaign to try to raise $7,600. If I can raise that
amount it will cover printing, distribution, a web platform and leave money
for advertising and promotion. I am an experienced self publisher as
well as having a background working for publishers, and I know from bitter
experience that without money for promotion and advertising you wind up
with a lot of unsold books just sitting in your closet and lot of
potential readers who never hear about it. Perhaps I shouldn't say
this but the comic WILL come out even if the fundraising fails. No
indy artists worth their salt is going to let a little thing like public
indifference stop them. But the bottom line truth of it is, without
the fundraising I will be scraping the bottom of my personal funds just to
pay printing, so unless you happen to shop at one of the friendly stores in
Minneapolis who will put it on their shelves or see me at a conventions -
and I rarely appear outside the upper Midwest - or stumble across it on the
internet by accident, you will probably never hear of the comic or know it
exists. And that's sad because I really think this comic could
potentially have a circulation in the high 5 figures and replace my
straight job allowing me to draw many more issues much quicker. But
financed out of my pocket, the promotion will minimal to non-existent and
I have to keep the straight job meaning even if I work steady in 'spare'
time it will be struggle just to get out 2 issues a year. And when
you don't have issues coming out it is a self defeating cycle because it's
hard to build an audience on 1 or 2 issues a year. Trying to break
out of that cycle is the purpose of trying Kickstarter. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1122615729/punk-rock-comics-1
You stated
somewhere that with Punk Rock Comics you want to do "the most
psychotronic comicbook ever produced" - you just have to elaborate on
that! I can best answer that by saying that the 8 page
prolog includes multiple shots of El Hijo del Cthulhu smashing buildings,
Leopard Girl racing through the city ahead of him in her mag/lev hotrod
with the Mayor. Black Dwarf shooting it out with gangsters and
hooking up with the young adult drug dealing gang called 'Kidgang' who he
will be mentoring in future issues and a 'trans-genre conference call'
with Leopard Girl, Black Dwarf, Enchanted Dagger, Speed Centaur, Robot
Jungle Girl, The Radioactive Kid, Doc. Delilah, Sheriff Judy and
Summer Sky. The next 8 pages feature buxotic Sheriff Judy and Summer
Sky from my adult comics in PG-13 versions battling through a wax museum
of monsters come to life in what is essentially a tribute to Mexican
monster movies. So that's a busty black cowgirl and sexy Vietnamese
vixen wielding a baseball bat wrapped in barb wire against Nostradamous
the Vampire, the Werewolf, the Bloodthirsty Beast, Frankenstein's Monster,
Baron Terror, The Ghost of the Crying Woman, The Aztec Mummy and Coffin
Joe. And they win the battle. In 8 pages. And a surprise new
character is introduced. The last 8 pages is a no holds barred brawl
between El Hijo del Cthulhu and Robo Gog ( the giant robot Doc. Delilah
invented in my Big Monster Fight comic). And I try to break as many
rules of Kaiju vs Robot fights as I can in that struggle. So that's
what I mean- non stop violence, sex appeal, monsters and everything else I
ever liked about comic books, genre movies and cheezy TV shows mashed
together with a sledgehammer.
|
What were your inspirations for writing Punk
Rock Comics?I haven't had much out the last few years
and have kind of floundered from one project to another, many of them
unfinished and unpublished, working on my style. This idea blends my
longstanding desire to try to create an 'all action' project that would
have some kind of action element on every page with the desire to create a
vehicle that would be a sort of overview of all my characters and let me
do some Robot Jungle Girl pages and then do Speed Centaur or Sheriff Judy
or even invent someone new and tie it all together.
How would you describe your drawing
style on Punk Rock Comics?
The easy way to explain is if a comic fan is familiar with the famous
French artist Moebius. Moebius used to draw Blueberry, one of
the greatest western comics ever, in a very busy, fantastically
detailed style loaded with solid black areas and textures - then at some
point he turned against what he was doing and began moving in the
opposite direction stylistically. By the time we get to The
Airtight Garage and his other later work he is just outlining
everything with a pen, no solid blacks, very few textures and his
detail work has achieved a perfect balance so that his work is no
longer 'busy' but elegant in its clarity. I have struggled with
what I was doing on the drawing board for years as I am somewhat
obsessive/compulsive and tend to spend way too much time worrying
about the weight (thickness) of every line putting in tiny details
that get lost when the work is reduced anyways. I used to
laboriously pencil in everything completely then trace over it with
the ink as if each line was life or death. It was an
excruciating process and although other artists often told me I was a
'great inker' I dreaded inking stage of the page as pure frustrating
tedium. After much trial and error I made some big changes and
came up with an 'outline' style of my own that works for me.
First- I no longer reduce! Since I am going to obsessively draw
small anyways ( I've tried to stop and can't!) I simply draw all my
pages actual size now. I no longer use a pencil for most pages.
I thumbnail what I want, measure the panels on the board, trace off
the panels onto tracing paper and use a fat marker to do a layout on
the tracing paper. I then tighten up the layout with a pen on an
overlaying sheet of tracing paper and then tape that piece of paper to
the back of my Bristol board. Then I letter the word balloons on
the page - I now have a page with just panels and word balloons in ink
-
then put the page on my light box and using a pen, draw the finished
art directly in ink based on the final layout which shows through on
the lightbox. No pencil touches the page and there is no
erasing, just a little correction with white paint for any place I
screw up. So it's a radically different approach both from what
I used to do and from what is the conventional way of doing comics in
America. I call it 'my policy of radical discrimination against
blacks'! My wife - who is black - has said I need a better name
for it than that. So I am thinking about calling it 'I hate
blacks'. But I am open to finding a better name for it...
Any idea when and
where Punk Rock Comics #1 will be released yet? Well,
I'm going to go ahead and give you the link here for the Kickstarter drive
which has more information than anyone needs about the project, the link
is
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1122615729/punk-rock-comics-1
and point out that if anyone is seriously interested in reading the book
they should pledge $10 because if the fundraising drive fails to meet its
goal - and it's a toss up now - you will not be charged for the pledge and
pay nothing - that's the way Kickstarter works - but if I meet the goal any
you pay the $10 you get a signed copy of the book as soon as it comes out
and the postage is included in $10, there is no postage charge. So
when you combine the cover price, which will likely be $4 with what you
would have to pay in postage which would have to be at least $3 since I
mail first class and flat to anywhere in the world, and consider that you
are getting a signed book for only a few dollars more than cover price +
postage, it's a pretty good deal. And if you want to go to $20 I am
including signed copies of Big Monster Fight #0 & #1 a book that is
totally out of print and unavailable unless you come to Minneapolis for a
comic convention and buy it from me! So I think the return on
donations is very reasonable and provides value for the money. But
everyone should check it out even if you have no intention of donating
because if you like what you see you can provide an invaluable service to
the effort by sharing the link on your social media and that's free! If the effort to raise money fails I will be putting up a website to sell
this and my other past and future comics and the best way to follow my
efforts in that regard is to either 'friend' me personally on Facebook at
J. Scott Naylor (yes 'Sandez Rey' is a pen name as Spanish speakers knew
already - it means roughly "nonsense king") or come to my art
archive page on Facebook titled Sandez Rey's Crypt of Underground Art.
There's a ton of artwork there of very questionable taste, including lots
of nudes, and if you 'like' the page you will see all the new art as I put
it in there and get updates and links to everything I have coming out.
I should also encourage everyone to read a complete 24 page comic book for
FREE at http://robotjunglegirl.blogspot.com
(just scroll down to the oldest post and read the chapters in order by
scrolling up to the next post) and you can read 16 pages or so of an
unfinished abandoned story at
http://cthulhupunksundaypage.blogspot.com/
again by reading oldest post first. Punk
Rock Comics #1 already sets the bar high for things happening in that
universe - so how are you planning to top this in later issues? I
never worry about topping myself or coming up with an idea. I try
not to think of story ideas, my mind is flooded with disturbing thoughts
constantly and I already have more ideas than I could ever draw and more
come unbidden all the time. My mom used to tell me that if I
continued to read and watch nothing but 'garbage' that my brain would be
filled with nothing but garbage and she was right. Thanks for the
tip, mom! She also thought the Beatles were 'garbage' and repeatedly
told me and my big sister so when we were wearing out our Beatles singles
on a little plastic Sears record player back in the early sixties.
Since
it's in the title: What does punk rock mean to you in your private life? I
talk about this some on the Kickstarter proposal and I don't want anyone
to think I am whining or feeling sorry for myself, because I am not, I've
had a good life. I haven't yet accomplished everything I want to but
who has? Having said that, I grew up with one friend, the boy who
lived behind me and was born just a month or so before me. We did
everything together, then when I was 9 he moved away and I didn't see him
again until high school when everything was different. It was
devastating. We were very poor - navy beans on bread seasoned
with salt and pepper for dinner poor - but we were the hidden poor.
We lived in a 'suburb' but had no garage, an unpaved driveway and a
tiny portable b/w TV in the living room for entertainment. Our
house payment was only $135 a month and it still went into forclosure 3
times and was pulled back from the brink each time by my dad's talent
for bullshitting and making empty promises. When I was 10 my parents
started arguing in earnest and screamed at each other like insane people
for the next year creating a nightmarish home life. When I was 11 my
parents divorced and money problems got even worse. Dad couldn't pay child
support, his landscaping business was just enough to keep him in cheap
drink. At age 12 I went to work for him full time doing a man's job
every spring and fall weekend and all summer, laying sod and planting
trees and such. It was backbreaking adult work and I was a 12 year
old boy. But it put money in my pocket, a lot of which wound up
being 'borrowed' to mom to pay bills. She eventually paid it all
back (she worked two jobs 7 days a week for 5 years straight without a
day off herself after the divorce) but at one point her tab was up to
$600 which is the equivalent of owing thousands in today's money. My
big sis took me to a Jesus meeting and I became a born-again
Christian just in time to enter Jr. High school wearing a Jesus button ön
my shirt everyday and determined not to respond to any abuse. Which
lasted about 6 months but by the time I started fighting back I was the
favorite target of every bully in school and spent about a year having one
fistfight after another and taken numerous beatings. And dispensed a
few to be fair - and there are still a few more I am going to dispense if I
ever run into certain people again. I tried to get parental
attention to my woes, but she did nothing. I stopped doing
schoolwork and the school didn't care. They passed me through 3
grades without me turning in any assignments. When I started high
school at the age of 15 I had quite an attitude - I had adult money in my
pocket, contempt for school and authority and the willingness to punch a
guy twice my size in the face. I started hanging around with T. K. -
a known bad boy who had been one of the biggest stoners in my Jr. High.
I started smoking weed and fell in love with it, I was selling it 2 months
after smoking my first bowl. Me and T.K. became partners in weed and
joined at the hip in everything and soon were ringleaders in the gang of
about 50 or so student stoners and troublemakers. I was having a
great time. Then I went to see Iggy Pop ($6.50 day of the show)
touring for his Lust for Life LP just because a friend had said he was
'cool'. From the moment the local warm up group - The Suicide
Commandos, Minneapolis' first and finest punk group - hit the stage my life
was changed forever. I became a devoted punk started
hanging out and drinking at our version of CBGBs a pit called Jay's
Longhorn Saloon at age 15 - they didn't check ID and didn't care - followed
local bands and partied and drank every weekend, saw all the great punk
acts including Iggy 4 more times and the Ramones 4 times including their Rocket to Russia tour with their original drummer Tommy and the Runaways
for warm up. Fast forward 12 blurry but fun years, countless drug
sales, hustles and odd jobs and the old gang has broken up and
getting high and drunk all the time has become a boring routine. So
I quit smoking, which I stuck to for 12 years and pursued my childhood
dream of drawing comicbooks from scratch. I did go back to smoking
but I am actually quit again now with rare exceptions. And here I
am, a crusty old punk, still loyal to punk flag after all these years. Any
future projects beyond Punk Rock Comics? My plan is
to spend the rest of my life adding new issues to this project, that is
why I am going with such an open ended title. I want this to be the
banner under which the rest of my cartooning is published.
|
|
Feeling lucky ? Want to search for books by Sandez Rey yourself? |
The links below will take you just there!!! (commissions earned) |
|
|
|
Anything
else you are dying to mention and I have merely forgotten to ask?
Well, you know I love rare movies, I've become a big Reiko Ike fan in
recent years and just added Guerilla Girl Boss 6 and 7 to my collection
but haven't watched them yet. I was blown away by Instructors of
Death and 8 Diagram Pole Fighter, two Shaw Brothers movies by the
director of 36th Chamber of
Shaolin, they are BETTER than the more
famous 36th Chamber of
Shaolin and frankly two of the best Kung Fu movies I've
ever seen! I can also recommend to every horror fan Monstrous
Dr. Crimin, a b/w Mexican horror movie that is one of the best in my rather
large collection of those.
Other than that I just want to thank you for your interest in my
work and allowing me to talk about this comic on your website which is a
site I am happy to endorse to anyone. I have a collection of
thousands of rare movies myself from all around the world so I know
enough to know that you know what you are talking about, and you do.
It's always fun to talk movies with you and I will drop you a email when
I get my to watch my stack so we can compare notes. And a big
thank you to anyone who took the time to read this.
Thanks
for the interview!
|