Summer Reading

Robert Boyd

Summer reading is always advertised as light reading, but a better description is "reading for pleasure". For me, all reading is for pleasure--I haven't read a book because I had to since I left grad school. My reading this summer has mostly fallen into various long-time interests of mine. And because I continue to be unemployed, I've had plenty of time to read. (Any job leads would be much appreciated, readers!)

I'm arranging my reading by category below. I always have a group of subjects that interest me at any given time...

• Soviet history

For most of my life, I thought the Soviet Union was a boring place. How do you have an interesting history or society when every move you make is regulated and controlled by a central state, eager to suppress any personal feelings you might have? I had read some Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in high school, but never delved deeper until much later. I was 29 when the Soviet Union fell, and that seemed to me like a good moment to never think about it again.

But shortly after that, I became interested in the nonconformist Soviet artists who arose mostly in the 1970s. For example,  Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov. In 1994, a really good book, The Ransom of Russian Art by John McPhee, was published. It was about how economics professor Norton Dodge started buying art by nonconformist artists on his many trips to the USSR (his academic specialty was Soviet economics). His story was exciting. But it left me with a lot of questions. What had happened to Soviet culture that had lead to these artists doing what they did? I started investigating. And culture couldn't be separated from history, and the history turned out to be fascinating. And since perestroika, lots of previously suppressed historical information has become available. My interest in the Soviet Union has kind of snowballed ever since. This summer I read:

Who Killed Kirov?: The Kremlin's Greatest Mystery by Amy Knight (2000).  Sergei Kirov was the Communist party boss of Leningrad. He was assassinated in December 1934, an event that precipitated the Great Purge, in which Stalin had thousands of loyal Communists (aka "old Bolsheviks") executed. This book makes the completely circumstantial case that Stalin was behind Kirov's assassination mainly by showing that Kirov had gotten on Stalin's wrong side. This thesis seems plausible but is unproven. The value of the book is in its biography of Kirov--what did it look like to be an important young Bolshevik before and after the rise to power of the Bolsheviks in 1917? And its detailed description of the political intrigue just prior and just after Kirov's death is fascinating. The trajectory towards death of three of the most important old Bolsheviks, Zinoviev, Kamanev and Bukharin, is particularly interesting. Very readable, but expect to be snowed under by lots of Russian names.


Ernst Neizvestnyi, gravestone of Nikita Khrushchev, 1995

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman (2004). There are a lot of good books about Stalin, but this is the only one I know about his successor, Khrushchev. I was particularly interested in Khrushchev because he undid so much of what Stalin did--the so-called Khrushchev Thaw. He denounced Stalin in the "secret speech" in 1956 and emptied out the gulags. Under Khrushchev, there was a general liberalization of the arts. Khrushchev personally permitted  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to be published--it was the first literary account of life in Stalin's Gulag published in the USSR. But Khrushchev also suppressed Doctor Zhivago. The fact was that he wasn't a particularly cultured person and allowed himself to be influenced by the "experts", some of whom were progressive and some of whom were reactionary Stalinist holdovers. But of course, this is only a small part of his life and political career. More interesting is how a member of Stalin's inner circle became a reformer who ran the USSR for 10 years before being replaced in a coup by neostalinists lead by Leonid Brezhnev, who had been a protege of Khrushchev. The neostalinists would rule the Soviet Union from 1964 until 1985. (Interestingly, Kirov and Khrushchev were both avid hunters.)

The image above is an example of the ironies of Khrushchev's reign. The sculptor, Ernst Neizvestnyi, had been in a verbal altercation with Khrushchev in an exhibit in 1962. Khrushchev was tricked into attending an exhibit of modernist artworks and had no clue what to make of them. Neizvestnyi was in attendance, and Khrushchev called Neizvestnyi a "faggot." The two men argued vociferously. But Khrushchev was no Stalin and there were no repercussions for Neizvestnyi. After he died, the Khrushchev family commissioned Neizvestnyi to design Khrushchev's headstone, which places a naturalistic bust within an abstract, modernist design. Fitting that an artist who stood his ground before the leader of the Soviet Union should be given this commission.

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich (2013). Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015, but she is what most readers would call a journalist. She is best known for creating astonishing oral histories. This book consists of people talking about their lives during the period just before and just after the end of the Soviet Union--the 80s and 90s mostly. We read accounts of life under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and the resentment that so many had over the economic depression caused by acting Prime Minister Gaider's "shock treatment" approach to market liberalization. Particularly older Russions who worked their entire lives in a shitty factory and suddenly found their pensions worth nothing. But the text is complex, and public opinion as revealed by Alexievich's interviews is full of contradictions. One of the interview subjects points out that half the impoverished pensioners were former NKVD  informers, camp guards, etc. They had been willing participants in a system that ground up and tortured millions. But many of the interviews are with people who survived that system just barely.

Khrushchev makes an appearance in a surprising way--in the "Khrushchyoykas," cheap apartment blocks that Khrushchev started building in the 50s which by the 90s were badly deteriorated. They may have been crappy, but had the benefit of giving many people their own private apartments for the first time. We think of the dissident movement of the 60s and 70s as having grown out of the Khrushchev Thaw, but perhaps just as much it grew out of the Khrushchyovkas, where people could gather in the kitchens to discuss subversive ideas. It seemed that everyone read samizdat and illegally imported books (like Dr. Zhivago) and discussed these ideas in their kitchens. But with the fall of the USSR, ideas were exchanged for stuff. All those kitchen intellectuals became irrelevant after 1989. Russia had no Vaclav Havel.

The hardest account to read was one by "Anna M.", whose mother was pregnant when she was arrested. Anna was born in a camp in Khazakstan and from the age of 5 to 16, lived in an orphanage. Her descriptions of her young life are devastating--I had to put the book down and walk away. She was 59 years old when she was interviewed by Alexievich. There are also shattering first-person accounts of the wars that broke out in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union--for example, the war between Georgia and the separatist Abkhazians, or between Azeris and Armenians. This book is almost encyclopedic. People who hated Gorbachev, who loved him, who loved Yeltsin, who were nostalgic for Stalinism, etc. A truly great work of journalism, and a great example why journalistic and non-fiction works should be considered for literary prizes.

• Comics

I have loved comics since I was a kid reading B.C. and Peanuts in the paper, and that love has had its lulls but has never died. All of the comics below are relatively new graphic novels.


Emil Ferris, 2-page spread from My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris. A powerful new graphic novel by a cartoonist who seemingly came out of nowhere. A swirling, colorful work, drawn in ballpoint pens and flair markers, it details the life of a 10-year-old girl, Karen. living in a rough part of Chicago in the 1960s. There is a murder in her building, and Karen is determined to solve it. This makes it sound like a Nancy Drew mystery, but it is much stranger and more personal. Karen's brother, Deeze, is an artist and takes Karen to the Art Institute where she loves the weirder paintings, and many of the visuals in the story quote the paintings. The art is unlike anything I've ever seen in a comic book, and I've seen a lot. The art and story are obsessive and beautiful and sad. This is maybe the best book I read all summer--definitely the best comic. (I think Secondhand Time wins the "prize" for best book.)

The Customer is Always Wrong by Mimi Pond. This is a sequel to her quasi-autobiographical graphic novel Over Easy. The main character is an art school drop-out working at a hip restaurant in Oakland in the late 70s. This is pre-AIDS and pre-Reagan, so there is a lot of sex and drugs (specifically copious cocaine use). It's a very entertaining and sometimes moving vie de bohème.

Demon volume 3 by Jason Shiga. This is the third volume of four volume series. Shiga is well-known for creating works that incorporate puzzle-like structures, and the Demon series is no different. The main character is a man who can't die--whenever he dies, he wakes up in another person's body, the person who happened to be closest to him at the time of his death. A series of incredibly violent adventures ensue. Not particularly deep but totally entertaining.


Seth, p. 29 of the last chapter of Clyde Fans

Palookaville 23 by Seth. Seth has been publishing his solo comic book Palookaville since 1991. It started out as a black-and-white comic book, then in 2010 turned into a hardback which was published approximately once every two years. This volume has the final chapter of Clyde Fans, a graphic novel that Seth started it in 1997, along with a longish autobiographical story and a selection of paintings. The end of Clyde Fans is kind of an epochal event in Seth's career as a cartoonist--the ending is very contemplative and somewhat melancholy. But the other story, "Nothing Lasts," is really good, too. A great work by one of comics' greatest artists.


Ron Regé, Jr., What Parsifal Saw p. 73, from the story "Diana"

What Parsifal Saw by Ron Regé, Jr. Regé has been one of my favorite cartoonists since I lived in Massachusetts 20-odd years ago and he was self-publishing comics in Boston. Since then, he has moved to L.A. and become a serious new ager, heavily invested in the study of alchemy. A major portion of this book is composed of illustrated texts from Madame Blavatsky, the founder of a "religion" known as theosophy. I find theosophy and new age beliefs to be utterly ridiculous, like believing in astrology. But these beliefs are seriously inspirational for Regé, and Blavatsky's writing has provoked him to produce a lot of very cool, cosmic drawings. This book also includes his retelling of the origin of Wonder Woman, which Regé describes as a "parody" of the original comics by William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter. But it's not really a parody; I think Regé was just covering his ass by calling it that. Instead, it reads like a straight-up retelling, lovingly re-drawn in his own style.

Everything is Flammable by Gabrielle Bell. I've written about Bell before--she's an artist I've enjoyed for years. A lot of her stories are somewhat cynical takes on urban life, but this one is quite autobiographical and seems deeply felt. It's about how her eccentric mother's cabin burned down and how Gabrielle helped her get back on her feet with the help of people in her Mom's rural Northern California community. I miss the urban cynic somewhat, but it seems like habitual cynicism is something Bell has grown out of as an artist.

Fante Bukowski Two by Noah Van Sciver. This is a sequel to a small book published in 2015 about an writer-manqué whose ridiculous pen name is Fante Bukowski. The first book was a small comic gem. 80 pages was the perfect length for Fante Bukowski. The second volume is substantially longer and the additional pages don't help. Van Sciver tries to make is a satire of the publishing world and is only somewhat successful. But he's great at depicting lowlife. The disgusting hotel that Fante Bukowski lives in is a comic masterpiece of total degradation, as is the recurring hooker character. And Van Sciver has a gift for funny lines. My favorite (in my current unemployed state) was when Bukowski gets cut off by his Mom. "Okay, think, Fante, think! You can't get a job! Jobs are for quitters!"  Van Sciver's art is perfect for the content--grungy, lively cartooning.

• Art

I am always interested in art, especially art that happens here, as readers of this blog will certainly know. Three of the books below touch on art here in Houston, but I have a general interest in the subject. I enjoy reading about art, especially art history.

Houston Reflections: Art in the City, 1950s, 60s, and 70s by Sarah Reynolds (2007). I've never seen an actual printed version of this book, but the entire book is available for free online. It consists of transcribed oral histories of early Houston artists, most of whom are still alive today but quite old. I had read bits and pieces of it in the past, but decided to read the whole thing finally. It's a key text in the art history of Houston--how did artists do their thing in a city that for the most part couldn't care less? Especially, how did African American artists make a place for themselves in a segregated Houston?

Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Expanded Edition by Lawrence Weschler (1982/2008). I first read this excellent biography of Robert Irwin in the early 90s (the first edition was published in 1982). This expanded edition was published in 2008. The new edition has 87 extra pages and disusses his big retrospective at MOCA in LA, his design of the garden at the Getty Museum, and his big installations at Dia. Irwin was born in 1928, which makes me wonder if there will be more expanded editions in the future. But since the publication of this edition, Irwin completed a major work in Marfa, Texas. It opened in 2016, so there is at least one more chapter to write. It is said to be Irwin's largest work to date--and if it's larger than the garden at the Getty, it must be enormous indeed. It is interesting to think that a biography of an artist would need to be continually updated due to the continuing fecundity of its subject. But that seems to be the case with Irwin.


Earl Staley, The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1992, acrylic on canvas, reproduced in Contemporary Art in Texas.

Contemporary Art in Texas by Patricia Covo Johnson (1995). Johnson was an art critic for the Houston Chronicle (which like most daily papers, no longer has a full-time art critic). This book is a survey of the scene in Texas at 1995, artist by artist. There is a little overlap with Houston Reflections, but not as much as you would think. By 1995, the art scene in Texas was quite different from what it had been in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Johnson was looking at art from all over the state, but if she seems to focus on Houston art, one can hardly blame her. Houston's art scene was very dynamic at the time--it dominated the state. (I wouldn't make that claim now.) Plus, she was located here and had access to all the artists in Houston. She was married to to a well-known Houston artist, Lucas Johnson (1940-2002). The texts for each artist is fairly slight--it's not a heavily critical book--and most of the illustrations are black and white, unfortunately. Despite this, it's a useful document of the times. The introduction is by Walter Hopps (see The Dream Colony below).

The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st-Century Art World by Roger White (2017). The description of this sounded right up my alley--a journalistic exploration of the art world as it currently exists. I was thinking it might be like Sarah Thornton's excellent books. It was OK and highly readable, but not particularly memorable. White found several interesting subjects to write about, including a mostly forgotten conceptual artist, Stephen Kaltenbach, but the book as a whole never coheres into a worldview. It feels like a series of somewhat related magazine articles.


Edward Kienholz, Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps, 1959

The Dream Colony: A Life in Art by Walter Hopps, Deborah Treisman and Anne Doran. This is sort of an autobiography of Walter Hopps, except that Hopps didn't write it. It's based on a series of edited interviews with Hopps. The interviews were conducted by Anne Doran, and the plan had been for Triesman and Hopps to work together to form it into a narrative. But Hopps died in 2005 and the project died for a while. The problem with it as a memoir is that it doesn't really cover his last few years in much detail, which is a bit of a disappointment to those of us here in Houston (Hopps was the first director of the Menil Museum). It also has the problem of reading like an interview instead of a written memoir. I prefer my prose to read like prose. But still, the richness of Hopps' life is amazing.

Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Diplomacy by Scott Bishop, Robert Ekelund, Danielle Mohr Funderburk, Dennis Harper, J. Andrew Henley, Jessica Hughes, Marilyn Laufer, Paul Manoguerra, Daniel Scott Neil, Heather Read, Sunny Stalter-Pace and Mark White (2012). After World War II, the State Department started compiling a collection of modern American art with the specific intent of showing it abroad. The idea was to show what free American artists could produce, unlike art from the Soviet Union, which was backward looking socialist realism enforced heavily by the government. The collection was successfully exhibited in Eastern Europe and Latin America but scuppered by reactionary forces in the U.S. The collection was sold off as war surplus in 1948. This book details the work in the collection and talks about the political situation that ended this experiment. Subsequently, the CIA (working with MOMA) secretly funded exhibitions of avant garde American art in Europe and South America. The essays in this catalog are very repetitious, and the collection is not first rate (the buyer for the State Department had middling tastes), but many of the pieces are great and the story is incredible and full of irony.


Hans Namuth,  Julian Schnabel, 1981

Hans Namuth Portraits by Carolyn Kinder Carr (1999). Namuth (1915-1990) is mostly famous for one thing--photographing Jackson Pollack at work. And they are great photos--they really give one an idea of what Pollack was doing. But he made a career out of photographing accomplished, creative people, including most of the other abstract expressionists and various New York School personalities in all arts: composers, architects, writers, etc. One hilarious photo of Julian Schnabel mimics his famous Pollack photos, but Schnabel is wearing a spotless designer shirt. It really typifies that era. Namuth wasn't a great photographer, but he was a good one, and the personalities he captured here make it worth it.

• Science Fiction

I used to be a devoted reader of science fiction, and I still read it from time to time. I only read one science fiction book this summer, though.

Earth by David Brin (1990). Brin is a writer of sprawling science fiction epics with tons of characters. He is most famous for The Postman, which got made into an infamous flop starring Kevin Costner. But the book was really good. Earth is about Earth on the verge of total environmental collapse and the many people who are trying to prevent it. There is some science fictional stuff about black holes, and millions of characters (which is typical in a Brin novel). And lots of stuff about the culture of the world that humanity finds itself in. In a lot of ways, the book is remarkably prescient. But I found it kind of boring--eventually I lost interest in whether or not the world got saved.

Open Submission Art Exhibits in London and Houston

Robert Boyd

When the Salon exhibits began in France, the only artists who could enter them were members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. No amateurs need apply. The rules were loosened up over time, but the juries were notoriously conservative. Because of the complaints of many artists, in 1863, French emperor Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte established a second salon, the Salon des Refusés, which anyone who couldn't get into the official Salon could enter. That first Salon des Refusés featured Le déjeuner sur l'herbe by Manet.


Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Manet, 1863

In 1768, England decided it needed it's own official art body and established the Royal Academy. It started an annual exhibit in 1769 that has run continuously until today. And unlike its French counterpart, it is open for every artist to enter. The Times Literary Supplement's podcast, Freedom, Books, Flowers & the Moon, had a very interesting segment on the latest exhibit, which just opened. The exhibit is displayed salon style in a series of rooms. Each room is "presented" by an invited artist and tend to be somewhat thematic. Each work goes through three layers of judging--one to get selected for the exhibit, one to be hung (work can be "selected but not hung," which doesn't sound any better than being not selected at all), and where in the room you are hung (near the ceiling, for instance, is not as desirable as eye-level.)

Each year they have a different coordinator, so that changes the flavor of the show each year. The show is commercial--most of the works are for sale and the big catalog lists the price. Half the money goes to the artist and half to the Royal Academy schools. This is a big fundraiser for them, and apparently for many attendees, the one time each year that they may buy a piece of art (which can be as cheap as £90 to hundreds of thousands of pounds for big name blue chip artists). You could amazingly get a Cornelia Parker for £330 (it appears to have sold already). Many of the cheaper pieces looked absolutely great--I know I'd be buying if I were there.


Cornelia Parker, Stolen Thunder (Once Removed), Digital print on hahnemühle photo rag 300gsm paper

They get about 12,000 entries and there is a submission fee of £25, so before they sell a single piece, they've made £300,000 in revenue. The process of judging that many works, even if you have a committee involved, must be intensely grueling. It used to be that artists brought in their work to be judged, but now it is done electronically.

I don't know if there are any other open call exhibits with this kind of lineage in the world. But according to the TLS reporter, the Royal Academy Summer Show is very popular, and it is my experience that similar shows elsewhere are popular, too.  The first time I entered one was in the early 90s in Seattle. I had an idea for a cube-shaped painting on wood that would have a grid of nails protruding in all six directions. I was influenced by nail-fetishes, but thought it would be interesting if the nails face out instead of in. I made this very dangerous object and then heard about an open call exhibit in town. This was before the widespread use of jpegs, so works had to be submitted in person. There was a huge line of artists to get into the display space, including me gingerly holding my piece. (I didn't make the cut. Ironically, my friend Jim Blanchard later asked if he could have it, hung it over his breakfast table, whence it fell and punctured the palm of a friend of his.)

This is all a lead-in to discuss Lawndale's Big Show, which opens July 7. This is a juried exhibit that has been held almost every year since 1984. The rules state that "The Big Show is an annual juried exhibition showcasing new work in all media by artists living within a 100-mile radius of Lawndale Art Center." If you draw a 100-mile circle around Houston, it encompasses a huge area--Lufkin, Victoria and Orange all fall well within the circle, which extends into Louisiana to the east and almost to Austin in the west. Of course, driving to those places is further than 100 miles, but as the crow flies, they all fall within the radius. Consequently, every year Lawndale gets some work from the extreme hinterlands. This pays off in spades sometimes--like in 2013 when Port Arthur teenager Avril Falgout made Black Veil Brides and won a best-in-show award.


Avril Falgout, Black Veil Brides, 2013, paper maché, 75 x 50 x 105 inches

The jurors have been pretty great over the years. Among them have been Walter Hopps (1985), Luis Jimenez (1987), Paul Schimmel (1995), Lane Relyea (1999), Michael Ray Charles (2004), and Duncan MacKenzie (2103), who was the one who awarded Falgout the 2013 award.

For the past few years, the juror has always been from out of town. The last Houston juror they had was Don Bacigalupi in 1997, who was the director of the Blaffer Gallery at the time. One reason to use out-of-towners is to get fresh eyes on the art--to have jurors who are completely unbiased, who won't feel any social pressure to pick art by their friends and acquaintances.

But this year, that has changed. The juror is Toby Kamps, a curator at the Menil and soon to be director of the Blaffer Gallery. He has long been an active participant on the Houston art scene, including his curation of No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston in 2009 at the CAMH. He sent out an email to many in Houston's local art community (including me) announcing that he would be the juror. My first thought was that the impartiality of the previous years would be out the window. Kamps knows a lot of local artists, and even if the judging is name-blind, he can tell the style and approach of artists he likes by sight.

I expressed this worry in the Facebook thread, and several artists (as well as Kamps himself) responded. One suggestion was that many of Houston's finest artists don't often apply to the Big Show. Why? I don't know exactly. It used to be that you had to physically bring the art to Lawndale, and that's a pain in the ass (especially if your art is big). But now it's electronic. Part of it is that you get rejected a lot, which sucks and seems especially like an unnecessary insult if you already have venues for your work. And I think another factor is that the Big Show has come to have a reputation for amateur work (in the best sense of the word) and showcasing emerging artists, which for an older, more established artist, may make the Big Show seem less attractive. In the Facebook thread, Kamps seemed to be specifically working against that. He sent out his Facebook post to a large selection of Houston's best-known artists. He seemed to want the Big Show to be a showcase for the best of Houston, like the old Blaffer Area Exhibits, which the Blaffer put on until 2008.

One artist contacted me expressing a worry that this change might make the Big Show seem less welcoming for emerging artists. The Big Show has been important in years past for giving emerging artists the boost they needed.

But Kamps addressed that concern. He wrote in the Facebook thread, "I want the Big Show to be really big. There'll be room for older, established artists, rising stars, and lots of new talent. I want EVERYONE to apply, whether I know them or not."

Other rule changes this year have been that artists can only submit one work (in the past, you could submit multiple works, which sometimes meant one might have several works in one show--such as the little suites of work by Matt Messinger and John Sturtevant in the 2011 Big Show). Director of Lawndale Stephanie Mitchell told me that she wanted to "challenge artists to hone in on one work made in the last year."

To encourage amateurs and emerging artists, Lawndale has reached out to schools for entries. And unlike the Royal Academy, there is no admission fee, so that is one obstacle that formerly existed removed.

Mitchell added, "Toby's line of thinking--which I very much agree with and I think is very much in the spirit of Lawndale--is that by showing a wide, diverse range of artists working across different media and at different stages of their career, everyone is elevated."

I wonder if in future Big Shows, they could sell the work as the Royal Academy does. Or would that be a bridge too far?

Scott Gilbert Interview

Robert Boyd

In preparation for the exhibit, True Artist Tales at the Galveston Artist Residency, I conducted a long interview with artist Scott Gilbert. We put about half of it in the catalog. I hated to cut so much out, but had to for space reasons. So I decided to print the whole thing here. Please note some of the art shown here are photos of Gilbert's original art, and some are photos taken from the art published in the Public News and Houston Press--that's why there is such a wide variance in the quality of the images. The reason for this is that at a certain point, Gilbert started lettering his strips electronically. The original art doesn't have the electronic lettering on it, but in many cases below I wanted to show the lettered strips.

I spoke with Gilbert at his house in Conroe, Texas--a distant northern suburb of Houston.

Robert Boyd: Your background in comics and art. You went to high school in Tampa?

Scott Gilbert: Yes. I was in Tampa from like 1974 to 79 or 80. During this time I went through elementary school and the whole of high school.

Robert: What year were you born?

Scott: 1961.

In Tampa, I was already into comics. It was the ‘70s so there was a very heavy nerd comicbook fan culture. All my friends were into that. I told you earlier that I was in a Star Trek fan club. That was a big deal because it was a huge club at that time. The original Star Trek was huge. We did cons (conventions). I eventually formed my own science fiction club because I’ve always been a snob. I looked down on the Star Trek fans, so I formed a “real” science fiction club. And that went pretty well. That was just me and a group of friends from high school and some people we picked up along the way. We ended up going to cons and showing movies. We published a zine—a couple of issues. A little half-sized thing. So I was an intense, regular, white boy, comicbook nerd growing up there.

Art, fine art or anything hadn’t really entered the picture. I had all these pretensions, though. The “truth” was out there beyond. There was always something beyond what was really apparent to me. What was right in front of me, like the comics were right in front of me. Heavy Metal music was right in front of me. And TV and movies. Even theater. Some of my friends were theater nerds, too. I had a friend who went to Hollywood. He’s in Hollywood now. He’s a writer, a playwright. He’s done pretty well.


Laurie Anderson, Let X=X flexi-disc in Artforum February 1982 

In 1980, we moved to San Antonio. I started college at UTSA. I went into the art program there. Did all the basic drawing, basic photography, basic printmaking and all that stuff. A little bit of art history. That’s where I really glommed onto the idea of fine art. Artforum was really banging it out right then. The Neoexpressionist thing started then. It was just really cool. And punk rock had caught up to us as well. Like Laurie Anderson, her flexidisc in Artforum--that was a big deal to everybody. Lou Stathis was doing music reviews in Heavy Metal and he was talking about things like Brian Eno and Can. Stuff I had never been exposed to. It just blew my mind. And RAW came out then. I thought, wow, this is it. These are people who are really taking the art route with their comics. And I just saw that as a destination.


Kaz, cover of Raw #8, 1986

I was showing you my juvenilia. I was still doing superhero designs. I still had ideas to become like a mainstream penciler or something for a living. But that never really went anywhere. One of my drawing professors at UTSA told me I should just move to New York. He said it this way: “It’s like joining the Army. It’ll toughen you up!” I was petrified of that thought.

I did two years at UTSA, and my parents split up. My mom went back to Florida and I decided to go with her (although I was over 18 by then). I ended up going back there and started working full-time and going to school at the University of South Florida in their art department concentrating very much on printmaking. It was a really good program.

I was working really hard. Working full-time and going back to school, and Mom eventually moved to central Florida. That’s when we split. I moved in with a roommate near USF and worked in a Pizza Hut, doing fan stuff. All my fan friends were still around. One of them had opened up a comic book store. I used to hang out there constantly. It was a nice, friendly environment. Non-stop work.

I graduated in the summer of 1984. I was looking around at grad school. I got ahold of a brochure for the University of Houston that showed the Lawndale complex in photographs, and I was like, yeah—this looks good. And my dad had moved to Houston at that point. So I ended up moving back in with him, here, in Houston.

I started trying to get into the grad program. I didn’t get in at first. There was a post-baccalaureate study for a year that was kind of them feeling me out. The way that program went, they were really tight. At least the painting people were really tight. And I was going to go into painting because the printmaking department at UH was kind of dire, kind of tiny. They groomed their students from undergraduates to get into the graduate program there.

I started working there and they got to know me. And with the exception of Gael Stack, they liked me. I got in with the crew at Lawndale, this core of young artists that included Paul Kittelson and Noah Edmondson. The Commerce Street Artists Warehouse people had just come out of that program, so I got tangled up with them as well. And they started up the Art Car thing, and were involved in The Orange Show. It was an intense period because I had been working constantly, just struggling along. Then things kind of lightened up. I allowed myself to have my “wild years”. I got a job at Rice University working in the library then, too. Part time. I ended up working there off and on for 20 years.

Robert: You started True Artist Tales as a grad student. That was a class project?

Scott: Yes. You could take two independent study courses. You get a faculty member who agrees to guide you through a particular course of study. For a lot of students, it would just be a group of paintings or a major project. So my faculty member was Derek Boshier. Derek is a very special person. Great artist and a tremendous mind. He had such a history. He was a pop artist—one of the major pop artists. He was from England and that was exotic. He was friends with David Bowie. He knew Joe Strummer. He knew everybody. He’d tell these stories. But he had a great head for art. He really, really knew it. He was very much into pushing yourself, opening your mind up, looking into different possibilities, trying to do anything you can to get the art out.


Derek Boshier and Christopher Logue, Sex War Sex Cars Sex, poster, 1968

My thing with him was, he knew I liked comics. We had had an interesting class with him before that where you would produce a book, a film and a set of paintings. From the Super 8 film and the book I did for that class, he knew I did narrative work. He knew from talking to me that I liked comics. For this independent study, the thing was that I would create a comic strip—and it had to be of quality—and also it was required that I get it published somewhere.

Robert: At that point, Public News had been running for a few years, right?

Scott: Yes. I think they started in 1984. This was in 1987, 88.

So I get the first five I’d drawn to the Public News. I knew some of the people there peripherally. The editor at that time was Jane Ludlum who is also the wife of Kevin Cunningham (then theater director at Diverse Works Gallery and one of the founders of the Commerce Street Artists Warehouse) but she’s a poet and editor. She’s now up in New York—she’s been there for 30-some years being an editor professionally. She’s really nice and happily for me, I plunked down the four or five samples I had done, on her desk; she looked them over and said, “These are great! We’ll run them.”

Robert: They were all art related.

Scott: They were all art related. That was what True Artist Tales originally was about. True stories, anecdotes, satires of the people I knew in the local art scene.

Robert: So where were you living when you started True Artist Tales?

Scott: When I first moved to town I was living in the Fondren Southwest part of Houston. Sharpstown. I was living with my dad. We moved over to Alief. I lived with him for about a year and a half. In about 1987, I moved in with a fellow student Linn Swartz and it was in this house in the First Ward on Summer Street. It was that complex that was owned by Earl Staley. He was my landlord. That was an amusing situation. He had me and Linn and Ron Hoover lived right next to us in another bungalow. And James Bettison lived in a garage apartment behind Earl’s place. And then Derek Boshier’s studio was right next door to us. So it was this nice little cluster. I was there about a year.

I decided to move out on my own because I was not getting along with Linn too well, though we’re still pals today. I ended up moving to the East End. I got a cheap garage apartment there. That was a little bleak. That was the first time living on my own. It was a rough psychological thing. I was reading a lot of Weirdo at the time; that informed my whole existence.

I ended up bouncing around the East End for the next three years. Living in cheap places. I had another roommate, Henry Sanchez, a painter and now an environmental activist artist. And finishing up the graduate degree—trying to finish the graduate degree. I went through the mill. I had an MFA graduate show at the Blaffer—I was in that with my whole cohort. I thought that was it. I thought I was going to get my sheepskin and I was done.

Robert: So what happened?

Scott: I ended up moving to the Village of Cottage Grove there on the West End of the Heights through contacts I had into a cheap rental house. I was out of school, finally. It was the first time I’d been out of school in my life. It felt great. To be able to just work. To just bear down and work work work. And I rejected painting. I decided that comics is it. I don’t need this gallery thing. I don’t need all that.

My comic by this time was being printed regularly. I was hitting this audience of thousands of people as opposed to a gallery show where if you’re lucky 300 people see it. 100 maybe. So I just rejected fine art as a structure. Gallery art. And dove into comics. I did a few more things here and there, like that installation at The Art Guy’s studio. And I was still friends with everybody. It was a very good social scene.

Robert: But what about the degree?

Scott: All of a sudden I get a call from this guy. I can’t remember his name. He was at UH and he’d taken over the graduate student advisor position from Ed Hill. Ed Hill is part of MANUAL. Good guy. This guy tells me you’re not going to graduate because you didn’t fulfill the course work. You need to take a few more courses. I was like, what the fuck?! Because I’m not an idiot, you know. I read all the course catalogs and saw everything I was supposed to take and I sure as hell did the work. And I was just like, fuck you! Fuck it! I don’t need this degree. I’m going to work. And that was that. And all that was left was my debt. And I had the bad example of Julian Schnabel.

Robert: Maybe after this show they’ll give you an honorary MFA.

Scott: Right! At that time, I didn’t believe in teaching art, either. That was the best reason to get the degree—to teach art. It just didn’t seem right for me. But now…

Robert: It’s worked out pretty good for people like Kittelson…

Scott: Liz Ward.

Robert: Yeah.

Scott: I had taught and now I’m a faculty member at a community college. I did teaching as a graduate student. I taught drawing. That was a good experience.

Robert: Some questions about the art scene. Noah Edmundson?

Scott: He was an undergrad. He is and was a character. He was from Tennessee; I forget whether he was from Memphis or Nashville. Really Southern character. He was an oil field welder. He was just this gross cracker, lecherous hound of a guy. And he’s very funny. He was working the sculpture at Lawndale in their bay. He had all this crazy shit there. He wasn’t part of Commerce Street, but he did get a huge studio. It was an old machine shop just opposite Poppa Burger. It was rough and rugged. He would sleep on the floor on a mattress in this unheated place.


Scott Gilbert, "Honest Edmundson", published April 8, 1988 in The Public News

Robert: He was the subject of one of your earliest True Artist Tales.

Scott: He’s now curator at the art car museum. He is a dear friend of mine. He showed me the way to be a Houston artist—drink lots of beer and be a character. And I got to make fun of the art cars.

There were so many people. There was this core of really interesting, talented, funny people. Including Kittelson, the Art Guys, Jackie Harris and so many others. It was a natural thing for me to put these guys into comic stories because I read the scene that way. It was like a comic. It was like narrative to me. That’s how I interpret things anyway.

Robert: Walter Hopps?

Scott: He was somebody I knew from afar. I hadn’t even met him when I put him in the comic, but I knew of his history. He was a mythic figure.


Scott Gilbert, True Artist Tales featuring Nick Duchamp, Art Dick page 8, published November 9, 1988 in Public News

Robert: Did he ever respond to the comic strip?

Scott: He did. I did actually finally meet him at a party or something and I got introduced as the “True Artist Tales” guy. And he came over and said, “Oh Yeah! That was great!” He was so happy about being in the strip!

Robert: He wasn’t bummed out about being the villain?

Scott: He totally wasn’t.

Robert: Your two man show with Don Kennel at On Waugh?

Scott: It was north of Gray about halfway to Allen Parkway. It was one of those old quadruplexes. It was run by three or four people. Ted Brown, who was a bartender and a painter. A couple of women. It was just a nice little gallery and a lot of people showed there. Painters like myself. Don was my best buddy then. Don’s a sculptor and real nature boy, I call him. He was from Wyoming. A tall, gangly dude. Real funny. He’s out in New Mexico now and he’s doing quite well doing public art. He’s involved with Meow Wolf. He’s not one of them, but he’s contributed artwork to that.

Our show was sculptures by him and paintings and drawings by me. It was just your basic two-man show. The funny thing in that show was that I had done a painting on a plastic yellow canoe that I found in the trash next to Interstate 45. I did an abstract painting on it. We hung it vertically from the roof in front of the gallery. The night of the opening, Hurricane Gilbert hit.

Robert: How perfect.

Scott: It caused the canoe to be slammed against the front of the building over and over and over. It was destroying the building so they cut it down.

Robert: Who was David Kidd?

Scott: David Kidd is still around. He’s back, actually, from New York. He spent many years in New York. He was a Lawndale product. Not a graduate student—an undergraduate. He’s from here. He was a good buddy. I took over that house in Cottage Grove from him. He just kind of ceded it to me when he took off on a cross-country trip on in his VW van. He only got to California when he wrecked. He had to come home. I’d taken over his house so he had no place to live.

He ended up moving to New York and worked for years at the Children’s Television Workshop doing prop work. He also got married to Deborah Moore (one of the founders of the Commerce Street Artist Warehouse)—they were up there together. And they just moved back four or five years ago.

Robert: The Nick Duchamp story—you didn’t start True Artist Tales doing serialized stories. What made you decide to do them?

Scott: That story was kind of handed to me by events. A painting was stolen from the Big Show at Lawndale. Walter Hopps was the judge for that particular show. David Kidd had done this kind of joke painting. It was horrible. A woodburning thing. Have you seen this?

Robert: No.


David Kidd, Oily Monster Melting, 1988

Scott: I gotta email you that image. He had done this thing and it was called the “Oily Monster Melting” or something like that. It showed a monster climbing out of an oil field derrick. It was as crude as possible on a wood-burning plank you’d by from TG&Y or something. Anyway, Walter gave it first prize out of all the 100s of pieces in the show. Not everyone was happy about this.

Walter was a bandit. He had a reputation for stealing art himself. So the piece got stolen. Mysteriously vanished. This piece began to show up at occasional parties I’d go to. When artists had parties, there would be the piece on the wall. Then it would inevitably disappear from the party. Then later, maybe there’d be two of them. They’d be in different homes at the same time. So that was where that whole story kind of came from.

Robert: I have a copy of a “Wanted” poster for Walter Hopps for that.


anonymous, Walter Hopps Wanted Flyer

Scott: See, Dave and the Art Guys were driving that whole business. And some of the Commerce Street people. This is the way things went back then. Comedy tumble. I put it all together. I was always big on noir. There was a lot of punning. Nick Duchamp, the private detective, the fictional son of Marcel. This was back when Houston’s downtown was still fairly undeveloped and in the crapper in the real estate situation. There was plenty of freedom. I set Nick Duchamp’s office—an archetypal private eye office with the venetian blinds—on St Emmanuel St. in the original Chinatown.

He was the only fictional character in the story. Everyone else was based on someone in the scene.

Robert: Michael and Tracy weren’t.


Scott Gilbert, True Artist Tales featuring Nick Duchamp, Art Dick page 8, published March 15, 1988 in Public News

Scott: [laughs] Yeah, that’s right. But “Michael Tracy” [well-known Houston-area artist from Galveston]. That was the influence of Los Bros Hernandez, the Mexican wrestling thing. I took a lot from them.

Robert: That’s what you were reading then?

Scott: I was reading everything though. All the Fantagraphics books. Weirdo. All the old Crumb stuff.

Robert: But you weren’t reading like Teen Titans and shit, were you?


Steve Rude, cover Badger #1, 1983

Scott: I was reading a lot of garbage. Badger was one of my favorite comics.

Robert: But Badger was pretty funny, though.

Scott: Like American Flagg, from First Comics. What was the worst? Was it the “Civil Wars”—the first horrible Marvel fuck-up that they had?

Robert: The Secret Wars.

Scott: That just killed my interest.

Robert: It was a comic designed for 12-year-olds in that they all had to fight each other. If you’re not 12, that’s not going to be very interesting. That said, I think Mike Zeck is a pretty good artist.

Scott: I thought there was a lot of Sal Buscema in that. I was reading a lot of stuff then. The independent press. People like Chester Brown. Pete Bagge. Kaz. Y’know, the whole crew. And obscure people who are gone now.

Robert: That’s one of the things I often remind people of. That there were really good artists like Carel Moiseiwitsch and Michael Dougan who just stopped doing comics.

Scott: Michael Dougan… And Dennis Eichhorn?


Michael Dougan, cover of Real Stuff #3, 1991

Robert: The late-great Denny Eichhorn.

Scott: I read all that stuff. I saw people doing their thing and getting printed. That’s where I wanted to go. I began to do longer stories and I began to push stuff out into the independent press.

Robert: I had been living overseas, came home and lived in Houston for about a year and saw your work in the Public News, then moved to Los Angeles to work for Fantagraphics. I showed your work to Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth and he just whipped out an envelope he had gotten from you, so he was already aware of your work. I was saying, we should publish this guy.

Scott: It’s tough. What was the most obscure place a regular artist for Fantagraphics came from? Most everyone was clustered in New York and Seattle?

Robert: No. Clowes was in Chicago. Dave Cooper was in fucking Ottawa. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Ottawa, but it’s not a big city.

You also collaborated with a writer names Robert Simms on a three page story called “But It’s the Law” in 1992. What’s the story with that collaboration?

Scott: Robert Simms was a young African American guy. I think I met him at the comic book store, actually. We got to chatting, and he was a fan. We got talking about doing comics and he had some ideas for stories. At that time I was looking for collaborators. It was something very different for me. We put together two stories. They were very short—I think one was just one page. And this one was three pages. Unfortunately, it went nowhere.


Scott Gilbert and Robert Simms, "But It's the Law" page 1, 1992

Robert: So it was never published?

Scott: I don’t think I even submitted it anywhere, you know. I couldn’t find a place to fit it. There weren’t many venues back then. I mean, you had helped at Fantagraphics. And Kim Thompson. Caliber Comics. Did you know that Caliber publisher Gary Reed just died? It’s sad to me because he really helped a lot of people. Dino Haspiel—he gave him one of his first opportunities to publish.

Robert: Do you know whatever happened to Simms?

Scott: No, I have no idea. I lost contact with him. I don’t know.

Robert: Another longer story was “The Whole Story” from 1991. 

Scott: This is a case of bad behavior. Sometimes you shouldn’t put it all in. It’s a true story that a buddy of mine told me and I got into trouble with his girlfriend after I printed it.

Robert: Why did you do a three-page version of it?

Scott: I was trying to blow it up. It’s just like doing multiples of a painting or an image. Just painting that apple bigger or smaller.

 
Scott Gilbert, The Whole Story page 1, 1991

Robert: One thing I like about the longer version is that it’s a specific location and a specific event that you mention—the Zoviet France show at Commerce Street Artists Warehouse—but then the published version was very condensed.

Scott: That’s another thing. Sometimes you gauge the length of a story. You gauge if it can go multiple pages or can it be just one page. I was thirsting for the longer stories. This is the beginning of that. It needs to be more than one page.

Robert: This was never published anywhere.

Scott: Nowhere.


Scott Gilbert, Jack Knife page 5, published in Negative Burn #33, 1993

Robert: What about “Jack Knife” from 1993? That was ambitious.

Scott: This is just me wanting to do a longer story. It got printed in Negative Burn. It was probably my first publication (outside of True Artist Tales).

It’s just a drive through Louisiana on I-10. One time when me and my dad were making that trip—we were right about in the middle of Louisiana, Baton Rouge, and a rig jackknifed in front of us, just like that. It was in the day time and nobody was shooting, but it was inexplicable. There was no road construction or anything. We drove around it and went on our way to Florida.


Scott Gilbert, "Amarillo" page 1, published in Pictopia no. 3, 1992

“Amarillo” (which was eventually published in Pictopia) was one of the first long-form. And this is building on a lot of that layout. With the ballet of the layout. I’m fond of all of that. It ends up with her—the old lady is whimpering and saying please don’t kill me—and she ends up crumpling up and kneeling in front of her and giving her the gun.


Scott Gilbert, Blind Force published in the Public News April 11, 1990

Robert: Let’s talk about local news as it affected you. There was that Scott Tschirhart strip. Were you following this story real closely? It looked like you were because you had a list of everything this psychopath had done.

Scott: I just read the newspaper stories. They came in sequence.

Robert: Was it well-known?

Scott: There was no internet back then, so I wasn’t able to research it very much. But I read the papers and talked to different people. I wasn’t a journalist by any means myself. It was just my interest and my outrage.

Robert: National events are a little different because they’re easier to get your hands around. They’re always in the news. Was Ida Delaney the talk of the town? It was a horrible event that everyone knew about, right?


Scott Gilbert, "The Killing of Ida Delaney", published in Public News, 1990

Scott: White people weren’t talking about it. That was part of the problem. One thing about it is that with local events, local bad actions, I hook into these stories by knowing the locale. I knew exactly where Ida Delaney was shot. I know that underpass. And that really drives the reality of that home to me. It allows me to illustrate it. Byron Gillum was killed down on Scott St. I know exactly where that is. I went there often.

Robert: How soon after the Ida Delaney incident (October 31, 1989) was this published? (The strip is dates 1990.)

Scott: I don’t know if it was right after. Of course, I was reading this stuff in the newspaper. So it must have been pretty quick.

 
Scott Gilbert, The Killing of Ida Delaney published July 6, 1994 in Public News

Robert: You revisit this a couple of times. One is a computer-drawn strip about Alex Gonzalez, the cop. And when he was sentenced, you actually reprinted this strip small with text around it talking about the sentencing.


Scott Guilty, Alex Hernandez: Guilty, published May 9, 1990 in Public News

We’re showing your follow-up to “The Killing of Ida Delaney”, “Alex Gonzalez: Guilty”. You’re trying to do your Mike Seanz (an early creator of computer-drawn comics) thing here.

Scott: This is “Scott gets a computer”.

I was trying to be a bad-ass through this. It’s very clear—we’re revisiting this stuff so much now. With Black Lives Matter and all the fucking murders.

Robert: I think “The Killing of Ida Delaney” is the classic True Artist Tales strip.

Scott: I feel like I come from a very privileged position. I realized it more and more over the years. It’s part of why I dropped out was because there are so many people who are silenced, who can’t get their voice out like I was getting my voice out. I didn’t feel like I had that unique a viewpoint. It just began to be “do the right thing” over and over again.

Robert: Let me ask you about the Public News. Jane Ludlum, the editor that hired you, how long was she your editor?

Scott: Not too long. There was a revolving door there.

Robert: Who did you deal with on a day-to-day basis?

Scott: I didn’t get edited much. I was usually dealing with the art director. That was one guy for a while. And there was a lady named Kim Stoilis. She was the main editor for a long time. She’s still very much a part of the scene here. She does PR work and is part of Discovery Green.

Robert: How did you physically deliver your art to them?

Scott: I had a deadline every Sunday night. In the beginning I would just bring the strip to them—the actual artwork. Then I started to scan it and I would have to bring down a disc—sometimes a Zip drive disc. That was a magic time because that’s when computers started entering my life. I’d been a geek in that area for a long time. I was also at Rice—they were improving our technology in the library and I was learning about that. I learned the Adobe suite there, Photoshop. And I was using their computers to do my stuff because I didn’t have a good computer of my own. I had an IBM piece of shit for years. I began to dig that. I got a bootleg copy of Illustrator and Photoshop that I ran off of a Zip disc. I’d go to Rice where they had the drive and I had my copies and that’s how I’d manipulate the art work and store it.

Eventually I got my own scanner and a decent computer. Photoshop and Illustrator were so expensive back then that it was impossible not to do a pirate copy. I stole them from the Public News. You could do that kind of thing back then.

Eventually we got past all of that. I began to put the strips together in the computer. I would compose them in Illustrator, scan them. Eventually the fucking internet caught up and I was able to start FTPing them. That was a wonderful thing.

Robert: Let’s talk about some specific comics. “Cartharsis” from 1990?


Scott Gilbert, Cartharsis published in 1990 in Public News

Scott: This is when we were parked in front of Fitzgeralds. You used to be able to park across the street in this little gas station parking lot, and we actually had this conversation. It gets hauled to the impound towing lot, and then you have to pay the fee and pay how many days it’s been there. It used to be downtown and now it’s out on Mykawa. There’s a lot of wish-fulfillment in this strip.


Scott Gilbert, "6 am, October 23, 1990 A Comic Strip is Born" published October 31, 1990 in Public News

Robert: What about the one where the newspaper vendor gives you a cigar?

Scott: I miss this. I miss being able to buy a paper from a guy. And reading the paper!

Robert: And the guy just gave you a cigar. Did this actually happen?

Scott: That absolutely is just right out of life. I think I mentioned to you that Raymond Carver thing about “Put it all in.” That was his advice. (To get all pretentious.) And also, of course, Harvey Pekar.

Robert: It’s not pretentious to have read one of the best-known short story writers. That what educated people do. It’s what people who go to art exhibits do.

Scott: People who aren’t from Texas.

Robert: “He Hit Homeboy” from 1990?


Scott Gilbert, "He Hit Homeboy!", published in 1990 in Public News

Scott: Again, this is absolutely right out of life. I’ll never forget that kid yelling, “He hit homeboy!” They were fucking with this guy. It was a weird store. Brookshire Brothers? It’s a rural grocery chain but this one was bizarrely positioned on Feagan down near Washington. Long gone, of course. It was a horrible old grocery store, but it was the closest at that time to me. Otherwise you’d have to go down to Randall’s in the middle of Montrose or to that horrible Kroger up on 12th St or 11th St. in the Heights. That was also right out of the 50s, that one. I know it’s a favorite of John Lomax’s. George Bush Senior’s favorite barbeque joint was right over there, too.

Robert: Otto’s on Memorial?

Scott: Yeah.

Robert: What about your three-part series, “Welcome to the End of the World” from 1990? I like all the twilight and night scenes. It gives is a noir feel.


Scott Gilbert, "Welcome to the End of the World Part One", published in 1990 in Public News

Scott: Until recently I as a late riser and a night worker. When I worked at Rice, I would work from 4 pm to midnight. Then I’d only have two hours to go to the bar after. It meant I got up late always. Most of my time spent during the winter—this would have been Thanksgiving—in the dark.

This was also the first era of autobio comics. There were so many that it became a cliché. This is my part.


Scott Gilbert, "I Do Want What What I Haven't Got!", published November 21, 1990 in Public News

Robert: As a shy guy, I’ve always related to “I Do Want What I Haven’t Got” from 1991. I can’t just turn on the charm in a bar like that.

Scott: That’s Rudyard’s again.

 
Scott Gilbert, "Hot Town...", published in 1993 in Public News

Robert: “Hot Town” from 1993.

Scott: That’s a great one. That’s Houston. That’s Houston right there.

Robert: The white on black lettering makes it seem even more oppressive and hot.

Scott: I had a good friend who had moved up to Seattle at that time who said the sun in Texas was like a sledgehammer.


Scott Gilbert, "What You Get Part One",  published in 1993 in Public News

Robert: You went in a surreal direction with “What You Get” from 1993.

Scott: This is why I do comics. You can do anything in comics. You can have an entire automobile stuck in a guy’s eye.

I had this awful breakup with this woman because she had some mental problems. I realized I was kind of driving myself to “save” her. I was trying to be the white knight. But I realized that she was never going to get helped by me. She was going to have to go through years of healing, and it was a challenge: are you going to stick with this? What are you going to do?


Scott Gilbert, "Power", published in 1993 in Public News

Robert: I like the “Kirby-dot” lettering in “Power” from 1993.

Scott: You know, it’s the goofiest thing. I tried to do it the way they did it, with the pencil eraser, and that never really works.


Scott Gilbert, "Leon Trotsky to André Breton 1938", published on February 23, 1994 in Public News

Robert: I liked how “Leon Trotsky to Andre Breton 1938” from 1994 contrasted the rather literary content with the mundane images.

Scott: I did a few of these quoting texts. That comes from working at Fondren Library at Rice. I was always up in the stacks. They had seven floors of books. Of course, the joy of that job was to get caught onto something as you’re passing by. And they had books going back 400 years on the shelves. I wouldn’t just sit there and read a whole book, but I’d find these chunks of text. I’d get these bits and pieces. It worked a lot like the internet does now.

This actually happened. My buddy, Randy Cole, had to come over and jump my car. And I mentioned this to him. It was something we discussed.


Scott Gilbert, "Duh!", published January 12, 1994 in Public News

Robert: “Duh” from 1994 is kind of a minimalist classic.

Scott: This is also very clearly the neighborhood I lived in when I lived in the Cottage Grove rental house that I had there. When you walked down the street, you crossed the railroad tracks, you passed this motel and there was this weird little diner where there was this guy who sold these boiled eggs. That’s all gone, of course. Although the rental house is still there.

A friend of mine bought the place from the owner that I was leasing it from. This artist couple that I know. He’s a grip and a special effects guy on movies around here and very handy. So he rebuilt this house because it was a wreck.

Robert: It was kind of shabby.

Scott: It was right next door to an artists warehouse which was part of the property. Tons of artist had gone through there. They took it over and fixed it up. But unfortunately, those guys got a divorce and she ended up with the house and he ended up being really pissed. She’s run the property real well. She’s a heavy duty environmentalist.


Scott Gilbert, "Suddenly I Fell Down", published March 23, 1994 in Public News

Robert: What’s the story behind “Suddenly I Fell Down” from 1994?

Scott: This is from when I had quit drinking and I was running three miles a day. I was going across I-10 into Memorial Park and I would always run at night on the golf course and the jogging track. It was great for me. You know, it’s nice being a guy to be able to do this stuff.


Scott Gilbert, "The Circular Sot", published in 1994 in Public News

Robert: “The Circular Sot” (1994) is like a Breakdowns-era Art Spiegelman.

Scott: I was looking at all that shit. It was breaking all the rules. You’re not supposed to have balloons cross each other, you’re supposed to go left to right.

Robert: You’re definitely not supposed to have arrows telling you which way to go.

Scott: This is more like a flow-chart. This is a real place. This is the Pik-N-Pak. That’s Ralph who owned the Pik-N-Pak. This is my friend Alan Ainsworth, a poet, who I was hanging out with that night. Pik-N-Pak was an incredible venue because of Ralph. He always had the roughest toughest band playing. Good stuff. Hard core. And really informal, too. Almost like a practice space for all of these guys. And this big deli case that he kept the beer in. It’s all Rudyard’s parking lot now.

 
Scott Gilbert, "Tierra del Fuego", published October 26, 1994 in Public News

Robert: “Tierra del Fuego” from 1994 is rather mysterious.

Scott: This is the one that Francisco Solano López (a great cartoonist from Argentina) read out loud to me at San Diego Comicon in 1995. I think he saw “Tierra del Fuego” and he thought, “Oh, the kid knows some geography”. He read it aloud to me and smiled, and shook his head. “Very funny” he said.


Scott Gilbert, "Somewhere in Texas" page, published September 13, 1995 in Public News

Robert: “Somewhere in Texas” was serialized in 1995. It was completely wordless.

Scott: The majority of what I did in the early days of the strip was political if it wasn’t dealing with the art scene. And a lot of anecdotal strips. And the autobio thing was going on, and I was doing that myself. I began to snap to some of the more formal and poetic elements of cartooning. Of comics. So I began to deal with more lyrical poetic themes. I was trying to sum up the essential spirit of Texas. Of this civilization we’re living in. All the good and bad things. Use symbolic mythical creatures. Monsters and whatever.

Somewhere in Texas had this whole Norse God set-up, but it was Norse Gods by way of the Germans in the Hill Country. I’m collaging things together in a lot of ways. The main character was this Cyclops. The way the Minotaur was for Picasso, the Cyclops was for me. Being a Texas artist. A half-blind dumb guy working muscularly in the art field here. And the secondary character, his partner, was the bass player for the band Rusted Shut who I had taken a shine to.


Scott Gilbert, "Somewhere in Texas" page, published August 23, 1995 in Public News

Robert: The Zocalo house band.

Scott: Also involved was a pair of Blackhawk helicopters. These two take over the Black Hawk helicopters in the hill country, and there’s a dragon involved.

Robert: There’s also guys in a satellite or something?

Scott: Yeah. There’s also a framing secondary story about this dystopian culture observing from afar these events going on. That was another device. It was just a sad story: these characters came to no good, and horrified the dystopian characters. It was all symbolic.

Robert: What was the reaction to it? Did people actually follow it from week to week?

Scott: Yeah, yeah. I always had fans. I didn’t get a lot of feedback, ever. Just from people I’d meet who happened to know I did it.


Scott Gilbert, "Luis Bunuel in Mexico", published on February 7, 1996 in Public News

Robert: “Bunuel in Mexico” from early 1996

Scott: Typical bad customer. All those years of service work, I was like, “Yeah!” That book was so good. Bunuel’s semiautobigraphy—My Last Sigh.

Robert: It was a good lead-in to Mysterioso. Mysterioso starts in June 1996. Apparently you got the bug to do longer work.

Scott: Right. It was more challenging and there was more room to do more things. Also, I was getting a lot better at it.


Scott Gilbert, Mysterioso part 1, published June 5, 1996 in Public News

Robert: In the first episode, you say it’s a 7-part series. (It ended up being 31 parts.) It’s a “Tone Comic in 7 parts”. What the hell was that all about?

Scott: Well, that was very pretentious. [laughs] The title is from the Thelonious Monk album, Misterioso, and the improvisation of him. This was launched as an improvisation of feeling about these elements: danger and mystery, the background, the religious stuff, all lumped on top of each other. I didn’t know when I began—all I knew was that I wanted to do an improvisational series. I didn’t know how long it would go, obviously. It grew like Topsy.

It was like jazz improvisation. It grew upon itself. It was really a growth experience week to week. It gave me the strength to do something larger and focus harder.

Robert: So you made a mistake at the beginning. Did you have a specific plan for seven strips at the beginning?

Scott: No, that was the best guesstimate at the time. But it got bigger. I actually only had the feeling about the story. I didn’t have a plot. I just knew this was where it was going to start. I knew the devil was going to come up out of the bay. I had to eventually actually sit down and write it. That’s when I knew it went past seven parts.


Scott Gilbert, Mysterioso part 5.2, published July 24, 1996 in Public News

Robert: At a certain point, you obviously realized that and you start numbering them weird, like 5.1 and 5.2. Eventually you gave that up and just numbered them sequentially.

Scott: This was also in the beginning of the internet when everything was numbered that way. These were like updates! They weren’t actually episodes.

Robert: And it has an element that up until then had not appeared in your work. It was pretty highly sexual. You didn’t get any specific reactions from that?

 
Scott Gilbert, Mysterioso part 17, published October 16, 1996 in Public News

Scott: Nothing really memorable. Some people were like, Jesus is a stripper, man! What is that?! That’s so cool!

Robert: Did you want to package it as a stand-alone comics?

Scott: Yes. When I did package this it was going to be published by one of the co-owners of Top Shelf, Brett Warnock. I redid the artwork in the computer quite a bit and modified it. He got cold feet on me because the reproduction was going wrong up there. I had saved these as TIFF files and I had rasterized the grey tones to pattern. They kept getting moiré patterns when he was outputting it. He wasn’t outputting it the right size, or something. He just got cold feet about it.

I thought this was going to be a big deal for me. It’s one of the best things I’ve done. The story is loose and big and I got to play with scale a lot. And that’s always a fun thing. I got to include all these Houston elements in this one. I’ve got Galveston Bay. The protagonist is actually living in the rental house I told you about. He’s in my house which was just as falling down and weird as this looks. Another funny thing is that I ended up moving next door to this guy in Spring Branch. My neighbor, the Mexican neighbor I had, was the spitting image of this guy. The strip joint. That’s a perennial Houston thing—the Galleria area strip joints and that kind of straddling of the glitzy rich area with the horrible sex trade and everything that comes with that. And the story about the devil. The devil is always awesome to draw and to use.

This was when my style began to evolve. I began to take seriously what Alex Toth said about simplifying.


Scott Gilbert, Mysterioso part 12, published September 11, 1996 in Public News

I got the devil in this Land Rover. Land Rovers were symbolic to me. The worst of Houston. The most pretentious things.

Robert: So there was no problem with the Public News over the nudity?

Scott: I didn’t get in any trouble for that, but in A Hole in a Man, I used the N-word.


The last shot in Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry 1994

This is a great ending, too. I always loved these 70s movies and those French movies with a hard ending. Bam! It’s over. Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. The ending is that their car gets crush suddenly by a train.

Robert: Obviously “Just Do It” from 1997 has to do with the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide. I liked the zoom. It made me think of Michael Snow’s famous experimental film Wavelegth.

 
Scott Gilbert, "Just Do It!", published April 9, 1997 in Public News

Scott: “Just Do It” were the only words.

Robert: Yeah. You didn’t tell your readers what it was all about.

Scott: That was a great period. Like ’96-97? It was this vibe of the X-Files and Bigfoot and Art Bell and these guys, it was all this conspiracy time. It was juicy and colorful. I love that, I love those years. All I was doing was living in this tiny apartment, drawing drawing drawing. And drinking beer.

Robert: In March 1997 was when you strip making fun of some ads in Public News was censored. So that image of the woman with the IV—whatever you were going to add to it electronically was like the dressing on the ad, like the logo and layout.


Scott Gilbert, "Marlene Deitrich", 1997, never published

That strip gets censored and Bert Woodall, the publisher of Public News, actually publishes something in its place. A little bit of text that in essence says, “Yeah, I’m a fucking sell-out.” I have a good photograph of what Bert Woodall put in its place—his “non-apology” apology.


Bert Woodall's explanation for not running Gilbert's Kamel Cigarettes parody

Scott: He always thought he was being real clever. Those ads were like the beginning of hipster ads. All the computer aided design was coming to fore. All that tricky layout shit. Those ads were just pumped full of that stuff. What was it, fucking Camel cigarettes?

Robert: With a “K”.


Kamel ad in Public News

Scott: With a “K”! That’s right. And they suddenly appeared in the bars. Those big fancy displays. It was the OK Soda era. That all kind of sickened me. That’s where Chuck and Viva came from. They were a little further along but they were like my early image of the ur-hipster. Yuppies who had a little more cool knowledge.

My parody was Marlene Dietrich. An old nostalgia picture. The cigarette ad always pissed me off because it was so pretentious. It seemed to be exploiting Marlene Dietrich and the whole nostalgia trip for fucking cancer sticks. That was like the beginning of the hipster period when hipsterism got so commercial. It began to be exploitative.

Robert: The “Hitler wore Khakis” era.

So had you talked to the Houston Press before then?

Scott: All of that was kind of coincidental. The least coincidental part about it was that I only made $25 a strip from the Public News. $25 a week. I never made much money from any of my comics stuff.

Robert: I know Fantagraphics didn’t pay you all that much.

Scott: They paid probably the best. I got fairly well mistreated as a cartoonist by the Public News people. They thought they were funny. One time I came into the office and they had this editor at the time—kind of a frat boy out of the journalism school at UH. I walk in the door and he says, “Hey, funny book man! Say something funny!”

Robert: Jesus. He’s lucky he didn’t get punched in the face.

Scott: So I was dissatisfied and then I was approached by a new editor at the Houston Press. It was this guy whose name I can’t remember for the life of me. He was a journalist who had just come over hear from Atlanta. He had done reporting on the Atlanta child murders. He was a comics fan. He had seen the stuff in Public News and asked, would you like to come work for us?

I boldly said, “Only if you pay me $30 a week!”

Robert: So it was purely a coincidence?

Scott: Yeah.

Robert: How weird. Because it definitely feels like when you read it, as I have done recently, you’re thinking, “OK, I just got censored.” And five weeks later, you’re gone.

Scott: They didn’t care that much. They didn’t care if I left the Public News. I had fans who followed me to the Press and got more fans there.

Robert: Did anyone at the Public News say anything?

Scott: Not really. No. They were like, anh, OK. They were pretty self-absorbed.

Robert: You end your run at Public News with a great image: “Long Live Punk Rock!”


Scott Gilbert, "Long Live Punk Rock", published on April 23, 1997 in Public News

Scott: My swansong. The publisher of the Public News, Bert Woodall, was a character. We had our outs.

That’s the Colorado River. I did a bunch of drawings from life in that area.

Robert: Then your first strip for the Houston Press was this one.


Scott Gilbert, "Attack of the Fifty-Foot Nancy", published on May 1, 1997 in the Houston Press

Scott: “Attack of the 50 foot Nancy.” This was to introduce myself to the Houston Press readers and to show my bona fides as a regular comic book nerd with Nancy.


Scott Gilbert, "We'll Always Have Paris", published on September 11, 1997 in the Houston Press

Robert: I liked the image of guys dumping trash in a dumpster in “We’ll Always Have Paris” from later that year.

Scott: I’ve done this. I’ve been there. I don’t want to say I’ve been there a lot. I know the smell of the things. What a pain in the ass it is to pick that up. There’s a billion of these guys all over town. And Lady Di and all that nonsense.

 
Scott Gilbert, "Chlorine Cowboys", published on May 21, 1998 in the Houston Press

Robert: “Chlorine Cowboys” from 1998 was part of a series of strips you did about cowboys.

Scott: I got into the cowboy kick. I don’t know what set that off. It was right around the Snake Music time. I guess it was going out to West Texas at that time. I would go out to Balmorhea and Ft. Davis mountains. And looking at a lot of cowboy stuff. I was gearing up for the final continuity, A Hole in a Man.

And this is funny because this is not a motel. This is actually the Richmont Square Apartments “disco pool” with the gay guys. It was the greatest pool which has now just been destroyed because they’re putting the Menil Drawing Center there. It was always a cool place. It was a huge pool and if you ever went down there, they’d have Abba going and Madonna.


Scott Gilbert, Snake Music part 1 published on July 30, 1998 in the Houston Press

Robert: What about the serialized story Snake Music? There’s not any art from it in the show, but it runs a really long time. It runs more than a year as a serialized strip storyline. There are a couple of breaks, like for Thanksgiving. But pretty much the whole time from July 1998 to November 1999 you’re producing Snake Music week after week.

Scott: That one was building on the experience of Mysterioso. I had been travelling to West Texas quite a bit at that time—I’d go at least every Thanksgiving. I was charmed by the Davis Mountains and the desert and everything. I wanted to do something with all that. I was doing sketches out there and life drawings. That was a great setting for the story. I was also dealing with my memories of tourist traps, the snake farms, that I experienced not so much out there but growing up in Florida. The country music element, the Mexican cultural element in there.

Robert: Plus you had the Mexican band that was like the mariachi version of the Specials. They did a Spanish version of “A Message to You Rudy”.

 
Scott Gilbert, Snake Music part 28 published on February 11, 1999 in the Houston Press

Scott: I had a good friend who I was working with at the library from Mexico. He was a Mexican opera singer. A cultured guy and a wonderful fellow. He helped me with the translations. I would come to him asking, “What’s Spanish for ‘a message to you, Rudy’?” I just thought it was pretty funny to have Los Especiales as this mariachi band and the lead singer being a guy with dreadlocks. All of them in mariachi suits.

I wanted to do a noir story set in that area. We talked a bit about that kind of 70s movie milieu of Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and things like that. The movies end with the characters dying—violently and abruptly.

Robert: Although in this case, the only people who die are the villains. They do die kind of abruptly although the sheriff gets kind of an operatic death—a police car full of rattle snakes biting him. One is hanging from his ear like an ear ring and he shoots it off—and ma nages to shoot himself in the head.

 
Scott Gilbert, Snake Music part 65, published on October 21, 1999 in the Houston Press

Scott: But the ending of that one was nihilistic. It was kind of mirroring some of my fears. The country boy, the putative hero of the thing, is so frightened by the idea of travelling to Los Angeles with a mariachi band that he runs off into the desert. And that’s that.

Robert: It doesn’t feel unrealistic, though. After what just happened, he couldn’t just walk away.


Scott Gilbert, Snake Music part 68 published on November 18, 1999 in the Houston Press

Scott: It also relates to Truffaut’s ending of the 400 Blows. The guy on the beach. I studied French New Wave film a lot. David Brauer was teaching art history at UH back then, we talked a lot. He guided my study of Truffaut.

Robert: Let’s talk about technique a little bit. At the beginning, everything is hand-drawn. But by the end, it’s largely electronic. Are you drawing anything by hand at the end?

Scott: Each panel would be drawn separately on a piece of notebook paper or something like that.

Robert: You told me you were influenced by the way Chester Brown did it.

Scott: He was the first guy I heard of doing it that way. It just made sense to me. The part I hated most about comics was ruling of the panel borders. Because I’m sloppy. I would always end up with things crooked. But in Illustrator, you build your panels and then you drop each individual piece of artwork into those panels perfectly.

Robert: So that’s why there’s no artwork for Snake Music or A Hole in the Man.

Scott: Right. With A Hole in the Man, something else came on at that point. I was sick. I had diabetes come on me abruptly. At least I didn’t realize I had diabetes. It came hard on me. It made it hard for me to sit at the drawing table for hours and hours to draw, which was required. I felt awful. It just kicked my ass and I had no idea I had it. I had hypertension as well. I was almost looking for an escape through these computer techniques to avoid work. Like the lettering. Doing the lettering on the computer—Jesus, that’s so much easier. And it helped me spell-check. It was very embarrassing to see bad spelling. And I was attracted to technology anyway.

The internet came on. I had a little website that Rice gave me. They gave all their employees a little space. I learned to do websites and I learned to do HTML. That’s eventually what got me out of Rice. I learned enough HTML that I became a web designer for a corporation here in town and quadrupled my salary. I was able to buy a house in Spring Branch. Because I couldn’t afford to buy anything in Montrose.

Also I was doing a lot of illustration work at the same time. The Houston Press also provided a tremendous amount of support that way. That was so bizarre because I’d do a spot illo and I get $200 for it. Whereas the strip, $30.

Robert: That is bizarre and perverse and shows how little comics are appreciated. And I think it’s still pretty much true.

Scott: Why does a dog lick its balls? Because it can. That’s the way it went back then.

Robert: So you started A Hole in a Man in June 2000 and in October, you stop abruptly in the middle of the story. Was it the health thing?

Scott: It was mainly the health thing. I didn’t realize how sick I was until later and didn’t get treatment until later. I was just stressed out. And I got censored again. I used the N-word in A Hole in a Man. 

Robert: When the black guy comes in the house and the kid’s parents have been murdered.

 
Scott Gilbert, A Hole in a Man part 3, published on June 22, 2000 in the Houston Press

Scott: I used it twice, actually. But it was just dialogue that is the kind of dialogue that would have been used in that period. And the psychotic kid character used it once and it worked. But apparently the Houston Press got a lot of heat for it, and they warned me not to do it again. That kind of bummed me out. I didn’t understand it in a historical piece of fiction like that.

Robert: Did they know you were going to do this long piece?

Scott: No. There was no editorial interaction between us besides them slapping me on the hand for doing that.

Robert: What was your relationship with the Houston Press like. By this time, you’re delivering the strips remotely to them via FTP. Did you ever talk to them?

Scott: Not really. Not about the strip.

Robert: What about the illustration?

Scott: Monica Fuentes, the art director there (she’s still the art director), was very good about working out what they needed. That was so nice because you didn’t have to think about the purpose of it. There was no editorial back and forth because the way they had always dealt with the comics like Red Meat or Life in Hell or whatever the other comics were, it was a product that was delivered to them.

Robert: Right. They were bought from a syndicate.

Scott: Yeah, and they handled me the same way.

Robert: Did you ever try to get True Artist Tales syndicated?

Scott: Yeah. I did. I did a lot of mailing.

Robert: It was so local and personal that I’m not sure it would have ever flown.

Scott: Yeah, maybe.

Robert: During the 90s and the early 2000s, you had a relationship with the comics world. You were doing strips with Pekar and had work appear in Negative Burn and Pictopia.

Scott: That blew my mind. I’m on a page opposite of Spain Rodriguez, a great hero of mine. I had finally made it.

Robert: How did you hook up with Pekar?


Scott Gilbert and Harvey Pekar, The Worst Possible Job page 1, published in American Splendor: Comic-Con Comics, 1996

Scott: I think I sent him some fan letters and sent him some examples of my work. “You’ve been a great example to me. See how similar our work is. I think you’re great. Keep up the good work.” He eventually sent me a letter saying, hey, we are similar, how would you like to do something for American Splendor? We started off with that little one-page story. It was a back up. I think I did one other one-pager. And then I met him in 1997, I think it was, finally, at the San Diego Comicon, and I spent the whole day with him. Hanging out with him. Sitting at the table and witnessing the events that would become a whole issue of American Splendor. I did the cover and two long pieces. There was one other piece in there. That was a great experience. That was the point when he had stopped self-publishing and he was getting published by Dark Horse. But he was still struggling. That didn’t end until the movie came out. That was long after I had stopped working with him. And then he died. A horrible horrible thing—he died.

Robert: You got involved with a bunch of comics creators. I know you went to SPX one year.

Scott: There was a class of ‘95. I won the Xeric Award in 1995. I got a grant to self-publish. The money was like $5000 strictly to be used to publish my work. The Xeric Grant was money that came from one of the creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I always referred to it as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Money. I was one of like five people that year who got grants and I came to know all those people through visits to San Diego Comicon and a bunch of them lived in Austin at the time, like Matt Madden, Tom King, Roy Tompkins—I got to know Roy real well.

Mack White was a tremendous cartoonist. I really became good friends with him. I visited him many times. I went to San Diego Comicon and went to SPX up in Silver Spring. It was a bunch of us kind of the same age or a little bit younger. We’d all cling together, sort of supporting each other. Have a good time together and do a bunch of drinking together.

And behind all this on the internet I was part of this mailing list called the Comix@ group. It was a bunch of comics academics and comics scholars on there who were also like the backbone of this network. Everybody knew everybody and everybody talked on this mailing list talking about comics. And that was something you could do everyday at work. Just chat chat chat. It’s very familiar now because of Facebook and things like that, but this was an email list. So I just knew a lot of people. I had been around a little while.

The weird thing was, even though I was bopping around doing all this stuff, I was still getting zero feedback from my local readers. It was before social media but email was happening. I had my address out there. And I had my website up early. 1995-96. But no feedback. That was tough, you know.

Robert: When you quit doing A Hole in a Man, did you do comic after that?


Scott Gilbert, "Comanche" p. 4, 1996

Scott: Yeah, I did the “Comanche” story. It was a spec story. It got published by Joe Zabel who was self-publishing an anthology. It was like Negative Burn, kind of. It was a mystery anthology. “Comanche” was an adaptation of a Sig Byrd newspaper column. It’s from his book, Sig Byrd’s Houston.

Robert: That’s long out of print. Where’d you get a copy of it?

Scott: Fondren Library at Rice. That’s one book I didn’t steal. That was one of those that clicked and I was able to transpose the time to a current milieu. It’s just a timeless story. It’s so odd. It got noir elements.

I really did it on spec. I happened to hook up with Joe. I was really happy with that story. It was the pinnacle of my achievement in comics.

Robert: But that was it! And then you went to library school.

Scott: That was it! I did bits and pieces here and there. Mack White put together a book called Bush Junta. That was a good one because I could do a satire of George Bush during the Vietnam War.

I tried to continue doing illustration, but that was the point when the internet started killing the alternative weeklies. They didn’t have enough money to buy illustrations. Plus, that’s a fashionable kind of thing where they’re always looking for new artists. But not much else.

I went to work for Cy-Fair College as a circulation manager. It was a new college they opened up on the West Side. There was a lot of work. And I had that rupture of realizing, “I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to.” It was a feeling of freedom. Like being released. It was like when I became an atheist. It was like, I don’t need God. I don’t have to go to church. I was able to just kick back and do my day job, then come home and have fun.

Also, I was getting worried. I’m a very middle-class person. I had that anxiety about making a living. Keeping a job. Having a house. You’re not going to see me in the streets. I decided with my 20+ years of library work—at the low level, the non-professional level—I would amalgamate that and go to library school and get my Masters of Library Science through this online program through the University of North Texas. A bunch of my friends at Rice had gone through it. If they could do it, so could I. It was great! I was working full time. I took it slow. Paid as I went. I didn’t have any debt. I didn’t take any summer classes so it took me about three years. But I nailed it. I got the degree and I did well. And two years later I got a faculty position at the junior college—the place where I am now. In 2009. And it’s been good.

Robert: So now you’re living in bumfuck.

Scott: Yeah, but when I got the job I was commuting 50 miles each way from Spring Branch. I don’t know why I did that for so long. I finally got this situation where I could get this house with my mom. We pooled our money and we got a really nice house. It’s a luxurious house—it’s great.