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Rants, Minicomics and More with Neil Kleid, Part One

Posted: Wednesday, June 11
By: Tim O'Shea

Neil Kleid is a busy fellow with a lot to say. Rather than giving him a long introduction, let’s get to the interview. In fact, Neil has so much to say this is the first of a three-part (very insightful and at times extremely funny) interview. Look for part two on Thursday and part three on Friday.

Tim O’Shea: With Late Night Block, you're aiming to perfect "the art of 'rant' comics". Would you care to explain what you're trying to achieve with these comics (other than ranting of course) and who are your rant comic contemporaries?]

Neil Kleid: Comics are a dialogue, I believe. The medium of sequential art is created, pushed and molded to allow the creator to use it as a platform if he or she chooses. Makes no difference if you're a "mainstream" creator or an "alt/indy" creator, the moment you put pen to paper or finger to keys, there's something you're looking to say. A story you want to tell. A message you hope to send. You don't need to be Will Eisner or Scott McCloud here with the end all be all of sequence and time. you might be Lee and Ditko lecturing on Power and Responsibility. Perhaps your message is that Your Mind is a Weapon. Crime Does Not Pay. Criminals Are a Cowardly Lot. Make the Muscle to Meet the Desire. Everyone's got an agenda.

Dialogue is important. Dialogue lets the Creator get something off his/her chest and into the hands of a reader. Opinions are made and either you agree or disagree. There are no rights or wrongs in comics (though there are an abundance of rights and lefts). The same dialogue appears in film, in books, in every form of media comics have been bastardized from. Art and literature doesn't preach to us - rather it opens avenues of dialogue. And so do comics.

That being said.

I've mentioned to people that I want to perfect the "art of rant comics." What the fuck? That doesn't even make sense. What's a "rant comic?" My initial foray into creating comics was a diary journal like James Kochalka's Sketchbook Diaries. Instead of capturing a moment of my day, each entry was an illustrated essay in which I, well, bitched about something that was bothering me. Tourists. Airplanes. Hangovers. Andrew Dabb, the bastard. Eventually I collected them into a 24 page minicomic with an exploding clown story and voila! Rant Comics was born.

These evolved into a weekly comic at Slush Factory entitled ONE OFF ("one off" is a graphic design term for a single sheet of printed matter). Problem was, I realized that my creative outlet was nothing more than me running nekkid through the baseball stadium of the internet screaming "Lookatme! Check me out!" There was no DIALOGUE. There was no back and forth. Who gives a shit about what I think about my oatmeal? Not Skippy McComicsFan. There had to be a way to say what was on my mind without it becoming (as one favorable reviewer posted) self-indulgent crap. Right?

Right.

I tinkered. I took issues like racism, sex, death, etc. and formed fully realized comics. Stable Rods. Empathy. Small stories about real people that MAYBE, some how, people could relate to. Empathy is about my aunt's passing and the resulting conversation with my mom. In it, I deal with grief and loss and for those who have experienced such emotions, it hits home. Readers have come up to me at cons with stories or sent emails about lost loved ones that really touched me. But on the seesaw of comics karma I have people who think it's still self-indulgent crap. Which it very well could be. You can't please everyone. Opinions. Dialogue. That's what comics are.

Of course, comics are also just good stories. Sometimes you want to see two trigger happy spies blasting the shit out of Little Italy. There are days when you don't need a gem of a tale about children - you need to sit back with a bag of fried potato twizzlers and The Interman 'cause they fuck shit up.

Late Night Block is a series of short horror stories that live online at www.opi8.com and in a series of self published printed minis. These contained tales are less "dialogue/rant" and more "wouldn't it be interesting if?" Sometimes I sit around, writing or downloading bear porn, and a random thought jumps into my head like "What happens when you get laid off from Hell?" They're riffs on the classic late night TV shows ("Twilight Zone", "Night Gallery") that used to scare the bejamboes out of me as a small girl. Something creeping behind the closet door. The airline passenger from Hell. The bar story. They're all there. It's a platform for me to dialogue in that I can try things creatively and see if they work. I'm currently working on a silent LNB story just to see if I can do one. I did a fable. Who knows what LNB will allow me to do next?

TO: What do are the greatest benefits and disadvantages to doing minicomics for you?]

NK: God, I love minicomics. I love them more than gummi chicken. I have so much control with minicomics. I'm like the lord high ruler of the long arm stapler when I'm making 2-300 foldy little books. Minicomics, as has been said by those with more cred than me, is comics at its core. Take paper, draw comic, copy, fold, staple and hand to local prison inmates. It's that simple. It's that freeing. Remember Shrinky Dinks? I had the bomb ass MUPPETS set with the little stage and at least fifty Muppets. For those who don't know, you get a stack of little black and white drawings on this see through shrinky paper that you colored and placed in the oven for an hour or so. Magic Shrinky Dink elves then snuck inside while you were watching "Speed Racer" and smooshed the Muppets down to one third size and baked them solid enough to attach to little pegstands. Now you could use the Dinked Muppets as impromptu action figures, creating scenes all over the cardboard set ("Oh, Fozzie. I love a bear with a sense of humor" "Shut up and kiss me, Sweetums"). The point is that you were taking shitty drawings and creating something magical. Apart from the oven and aborted Sweetums offspring, that's how I make my minicomics.

Benefits? It's validating. You feel like a deity when you're done. Stare at a stack of freshly stapled comics and see if you don't crack a smile. It's a way of getting your dialogue to the public without huge investment. Something you want to say, Sally? Put it in a minicomic. Hand it to a friend. Who cares if it’s not in Previews. Also, if you have caviar wishes and comic book dreams, minis are a good way to get noticed by editors and publishers. Say you have this idea for a confused Samurai that walks the streets of New York, 1900. Let's call the book Dead Ronin. Now, you can slap a pitch together and annoy the crap out of every comics publisher in the Western and Eastern world, sure. But without art, without sequentials, all you have is words on paper. But let's say you find a hammerin' katana artist who's jonesin' for some gangster/martial arts lovin'. Suppose you bang out 12-22 pages of script for him/her to play with and together you lay out a pretty impressive package. Now you have a PRODUCT. You have something SALEABLE. That gets publishers to sit up and notice. You've DONE THE WORK. You're willing to DO MORE. You're two steps ahead of the guy with the stapled script pages.

Downside? Limited audience. You're also always on the hustle. Unless you're printing thousands of minis (and wouldn't that be the divvil on yer staplin' hand!) and finding avenues for distribution, you're stuck to selling at cons, selling them to stores by the tens and possible consignment and talking them up wherever you are. Web sites and sub-distributors like Top Shelf have helped mini distribution come a long way, but there's still only so much you can do. As well, there's only so much you can do production wise. Don't get me wrong - there's some damn beautiful minicomics out there. Sean Bieri has been silk screening covers for years and you only have to take a slow walk around Jim Hanley's or MoCCA or SPX and check out the lengths people are pushing the medium to. Full color minis are in abundance as are die-cut covers and unique binding methods. Sometimes I try printing on different surfaces just to see what I might do one day when I have the dosh.

Which is yet another downside. Me broke long time.

Click here for part two with Neil Kleid.