Snappy Sammy Smoot

January 25, 2007
Interview: Skip Williamson
by artsRambler @ 8:49 am.Edit This Filed under Interview

In November, we featured 3 independent artists.
artsRambler Spouts: Guston and Keep Truckin’ — Skip Williamson, Naoto Hattori , Ron English
Soon after, the artsRambler got this in the mail:
Subject: Are You Nuts?
Excerpted from letter: I appreciate your mention.
One correction, though. I'm an ex-patrioted Chicagoan living in Atlanta
(not far from you guys), not California.
Thanks again. I often think nobody gives a shit.
Then I come across a group of artists sitting around talking about what I do
— as if it really matters. You guys are obviously out of your collective minds.

So since we are out of our collective minds, we decided to ask Skip Williamson for an interview.
He just seemed to us the epitome of the consummate independent artist,
ie. he just doesn’t give a damn. And he still can afford to eat. He kindly consented.
Rambler: Who were your major teachers? I mean this in the broadest sense.
Skip Williamson: The area of art I chose to engage — comic art — employs writing and drawing. I keep a small statue of the Egyptian god Toth. Toth was the god of drawing and writing, the source of all knowledge. The fire to be a cartoon artist burned in me when I was a kid. My earliest memory of trouble with authorities was when — as a third-grader I was whacked on the knuckles for drawing Mickey Mouse on my workbook. So as a kid the big artistic influence for me — for better or worse — was Disney. It's created a kind of "cute" cartoon patina over my artistic style. On the other hand, it makes an interesting camouflage.

The great daily newspaper cartoonists of the 50s were an influence. Like Harold Gray, Al Capp, Chester Gould and Harold Foster. And I was was just in time for the heyday of comic book cartooning. I also discovered that it gave me a warm feeling to make fun of of stuff. I was drawn to subversion. Satirists and literary insurrectionists were my role-models. I enjoy the cartoons of Tex Avery as well as the urinals of Marcel Duchamp. Within this construct I am what I am. But Harvey Kurtzman was the main man.

He wrote and edited "Two-Fisted Tales", the finest anthology of war stories ever, for the EC comic book line. He created "Mad" and edited it while it was a comic book. After he left "Mad" he founded and edited Trump, Humbug and Help! magazines, featuring the most brilliant saw-toothed satire and breathtaking comic art art ever published. In the early 60s in Help! magazine he published the early cartoons of Robert Crumb, Jay Lynch, Gilbert Shelton and Skip Williamson. His gleeful sense of anarchy fueled my own.

'R: What was your working relationship with Harvey Kurtzman like? What sorts of things did he say to you that made a difference?
SW: I published my first cartoon in a national publication in Harvey Kurtzman's "Help!" magazine in 1961. I was a high school student in Canton, Missouri, a small Mississippi River town. The cartoon was a simple, poorly executed drawing of two trash cans on a New Orleans street. One said "Black trash" the other said "white trash".
The civil rights movement was gathering steam and comedian (turned activist) Dick Gregory took my cartoon with him when he did a guest appearance on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar. When I was contributing to Kurtzman's magazine I didn't have much contact with the man. Usually I dealt with lesser editors. The editor who was my contact for the "white trash" cartoon was Gloria Steinem. After Steinem left the magazine my conduits were Chuck Alverson and Terry Gilliam. I didn't really get to know Harvey Kurtzman until after he was out of the magazine business and the underground comix were in full flourish. He had become an advocate of the underground comix movement. And the only artist of significance from his generation to champion what we were up to. I suppose the most significant advice I ever received from Harvey was to think originally, pay attention to detail and draw all the time.

''R: Can you give us a picture of what is was like working in Chicago during the time of the Chicago Seed?

SW: The late 60s in America was vastly different than the cloying corporate driven culture we enjoy today. It was another dimension, really. Chicago — when I moved there in 1967 — was a cold, repressive northern industrial city. In San Francisco it was the Summer of Love. In Chicago it was the Summer of Angst. But it didn't take long for the counterculture to take root. A group of wild-eyed radicals from NYC rolled into town and took over publishing Chicago's underground newspaper "The Chicago Seed" and soon turned it into a free-wheeling artistic and political broadside that, weekly, churned out rant, comix and dope-lore. Immediately I began contributing cartoons, comix and covers for the Seed. In the meantime Jay Lynch and I published a magazine called "The Chicago Mirror". With the third issue of the Mirror Jay and I decided to change the magazine to a comic book format.
Robert Crumb floated into town — he had gotten a free ride from San Francisco on a bus of ant-war protesters destined for the Democratic Convention in August 1968 — and the three of us put together the first issue of "Bijou Funnies". A new issue was forged every time Crumb wandered back into town. There was a huge amount of creative energy afoot. And we rode the wave. Maybe we were the wave.

'R: How do the various formats (painting vs. drawings for comic books, for instance) and the various media make differences in the way or what you create? Or do they? Perhaps they don't. Do you think about different audiences for each type of work or is it basically the same audience indulging in different aspects of you?
SW: I don't think much about the audience. Nearly everything I approach artistically is instinctual. And, because I understand narrative flow as well as design, composition and color, I can switch formats fairly effortlessly. I think it's a function of having done it so often that it becomes second nature.

'R: Finally is there a difference between comic book and graphic novel? I get this question all the time. It irritates me, but perhaps your response is totally different.

SW: Well, I guess the quick answer is: A comic book is concise but a graphic novel goes on and on.
January 25, 2007
Interview: Skip Williamson
by artsRambler @ 8:49 am.Edit This Filed under Interview

In 1969 I edited Conspiracy Capers, a comic book published by Susan Sontag and financed by Abbie Hoffman, in order to raise money for the defense of the Chicago Seven. Meanwhile Robert Crumb wandered the cultural landscape producing a voluminous comic art opus that, to this day, is an inspiration and impetus to those of us who followed in his wake.

In those days who among us knew we were creating “Art”? Certainly not those of us creating it. In fact, as far as we were concerned, these little comic books we cranked out were anti-Art. Not canvasses on a gallery wall viewed by the few, but an ephemeral sheath of newsprint to be read on the toilet and discarded. I’m still not convinced it’s Art (I waver) even though those who are in a position of artistic “integrity” tell us that it is. All we really had in mind was youthful anarchistic fun. And to establish a forum where we could give the finger to the established authorities and moon the vapid Art world, to display a wanton and unbecoming lack of propriety by way of our untrained comix and to release a pathogen targeting the orthodox.

So anyway, I’m in Chicago in ’68. Been there for about a year. By that time Jay Lynch and I had published two issues of the Chicago Mirror, the magazine of satire, opinion and surrealism. However, things were not going well. We had this printer who took six months to produce eighty copies of the Mirror, and there was no distribution set-up. That meant Jay and I had to go down to Wells Street every night and hawk copies on the street.

Unfortunately, as Jay pointed out to me, hippies have no sense of humor and, equally as unfortunate, were the only people unusual enough to show any kind of interest in the Mirror.

So the problem was, of the 80 possibly readable copies we got from our cut-rate printer, maybe only 40 or so very unusual individuals would shell out two bits for the magazine.

Let me tell you, that Jay Lynch is one sharp cookie. He says to me “Listen. The Democratic Convention is around the corner and millions of Yippies and hippies are going to descend upon Chicago. If these folks take enough drugs maybe we’ll finally have our audience.”

So we decided to do a Democratic Convention issue. We’d gotten fan letters from Woody Allen and Harvey Kurtzman and a terrific interview with Paul Krassner. How could we lose?

We could lose on account of our printer didn’t get the job done until well after all the Yippies and hippies had limped home, having gotten their brains bashed in by Chicago’s boys in blue.

So then Jay says to me “Maybe we should forget this whole business and do a comic book.”

I’m a little skeptical. “A comic book? Comic books are for kids!” I rant. “Besides, we have no characters. How can we do a comic book without our Blondie Bumsteads or Smokey Stovers?”

“Hup!” snorts Jay. “I have my friends Nard Kordell and Pat O’Kiersy who I can exploit in the comic strip manner. Hup!”

“Yeah,” says Jay. “And we’ll call this comic book Bijou Funnies. ‘Bijou’ is French slang for cunt. We’ll sell millions of copies to the subliminally vulnerable customers alone!”

Across the country in San Francisco Robert Crumb had just produced the first issue of Zap. And rumor had filtered to us that in Austin, Texas, Texas Ranger (The humor magazine of the University of Texas.) regular, Gilbert Shelton, was about to publish Feds ‘n’ Heads, a comic book for adult human beings.

“Well…I do know this guy,” I venture to Jay. “He slickers back his hair and wears a green herringbone sports coat. His name is Snappy Sammy Smoot.”

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