On making what the world is missing

You published over 300 books over the course of your career, which is no small feat. What is your process? How do you plan out your work?

I’m not sure whether or not I had a plan to begin with. It was sort of by accident that I realized my 100th book was the first thing that ever got noticed by a film producer and got optioned. And then my 200th book came out, I looked around and said, “I have to move to a different country.” And then, as I was approaching 40, I realized I had 260 some books. So I thought “Okay, 300’s an obvious goal. I can say 300 books by 40 and we’ll just see what happens.” Of course, I miscounted and it ended up being 311 books by 40. I think the real goal with making comics for me has always been to make the right kind of comics so that I have total freedom to continue making whatever the fuck I want to make.

Last year, in November, I announced for the sake of accountability, that I’d be putting out 17 books and I think here we are in August and I’ve put out four of those 17. But I’ve also put out seven other things that I hadn’t had any idea were coming. I’m the sort of a mix between incredibly ADHD, where I have to be doing something new every four to seven minutes, but also a fast enough worker that all those things end up getting done.

You mentioned 17 books being planned for this year, only doing four of the planned ones, but doing seven different unplanned things. How much of that do you contribute to getting burnt out and needing to pivot to something maybe more rejuvenating?

People keep warning me about burnout and I have this pretty high level of oppositional defiant disorder where someone tells me something’s going to happen and I say, “Absolutely not, that’s some dumb human bullshit for other people.”

I can remember one time where I was starting to feel drained and I was on a call with some other comic creators. One of them gave me really helpful advice about how when he’s well-rested, he makes better work and he can work faster if he’s taken a break. My brain went and said, “That’s not for Richard, though.” And I made entirely new these little 100-page horror shows that day.

This is just what happens. The more people tell me that I’m going to fall apart, the more I say, “let’s see.” Because the truth is if it all comes crashing down, then I’ll have the answer to the ultimate question, which is, “How many comics can I make before I die?”

Speaking of your 100-page horror comics, I know that you’ve published several on Kickstarter, each of which explores a specific kind of focus. I know there’s one about exploring obsession. There’s one about literally being seen and what that means. What do you like about that more limited format specifically for horror?

I think I don’t want to dwell on things that scare me. And with these books, usually just a little idea will pop into my head and I’ll spend five or 10 minutes letting my mind run with it and seeing what I can come up with.

These books, they’re less like comics and more like illustrated poems, honestly. What I’m able to do with the 100-page format is essentially explore one core thread throughout. The rule for those is when I have the idea, I give myself 10 minutes to see if it has legs. If I think it has legs, I just put aside whatever else I’m doing and I’ll do non-stop 24-hour work day and finish the book.

It means that I don’t have to take too much time out from anything else. It refreshes me to come back to my other thing the next day. It means that I’ve got a set amount of time that I can delve into every single possible version of why that thing is scary. For instance, with Crooked Little Town, it was what if there’s an entire town turned physically crooked by the weight of generational guilt and then it just became this like a man wandering through a space bent over by physical weight through crooked trees smoking a crooked cigarette, reflecting on what has turned the town this way. And any single sentence in that book could be implying 30 other things. It allows me to just get that out of the way.

Horror is such a popular genre on the platform and in comics in general. Are there any other genres that you’re interested in exploring?

I have done a lot of memoir stuff, as you know. With comics, a lot of it comes down to: How far can I push the comic medium? That’s the thing that always holds my interest because it’s such an unexplored language. I’ve said many times, but comics became codified so quickly by superheroes and then we went digital.

I know we can get into the argument that comics have existed since the days of cave paintings, but I’m talking about comics as we understand them as the modern American art form. They went digital so quickly and I think that we left behind a lot of the potential of what physical could still do. There is a language there that is complex and there are so many pieces fitting together. Every page of a comic is some amount of time that begins and ends at the top left and bottom right. The freedom within that is limitless.

So, in terms of genre, horror is a great genre to explore with comics because it’s a genre that can rely on suspense and dense detail or empty space or the haunting nature of seeing nothingness. It’s a genre that relies on you imagining other things. And so having the space of the gutter between panels really like highlights like here’s one beat, here’s another. You put together what happened in between. I want to explore everything in comics. I spend a lot of time thinking about romance, a lot of time thinking about comedy is one of the hardest things to do in comics, straight comedy because of course, comedy relies on movement so often. It’s very hard to show a funny bear in a suit falling on his bottom if you have to show him standing up and then sitting down and expect people to guess what happened in between.

You’re legally blind, and yet you’ve chosen comics, this very visual medium as your central medium, as your art. How does limited vision play a role in what you choose to put on the page?

It’s less that it’s a visual medium and more that it’s a completely flat medium. A big part of my eyesight deficiency is that I only have one eye. Well, I have two eyes that both work a tiny little bit, but my left eye is so poor that my brain doesn’t process any images coming in through it in the same way that it does with the eye on the right. So I cannot see anything out of my left eye, or if I do, it’s all subconscious, which means I don’t really have depth perception or at least I have real trouble perceiving it properly.

My right eye wobbles all over the place to try and form a focal point, but essentially the world to me looks much flatter than it does to the rest of you. And drawing has always been a way for me to make sense of it.

My parents were very insistent that I had to know how to read and write before I started kindergarten. So I made my first book when I was just about to turn four. It was about Donald Duck going to a haunted house and Mickey doesn’t show up to go with him. So he goes out on his own and he meets a ghost in the attic who has no friends. And Donald realizes he has no friends either. So he shoots himself in the face so he can stay with the ghost forever. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to publish that because of some trademark issues, but we’ll see.

I just started drawing the world and it was a very easy way to put things into my own perspective. Visually I try to lead people with the way that my eye would see the world. I try to say here’s the panel, here’s the thing that I’m noticing. I’m aware there’s other stuff going on around me, but I have a very limited field of vision and so I’ll draw that stuff afterwards. There’s a strange focus to everything I do, but I think it’s also why there’s an inherent clarity because I’ve had to strip away all of the distractions that other people are dealing with.

I love hearing that you’ve been writing books since you were a kid as I have two young kids myself. I think it’s great to be creating from such a young age. How much do you feel like your work has evolved and changed over the years? Do you feel like there are different acts or different seasons of what you’ve been exploring?

I was incredibly unhappy in my life growing up. I was living in New Zealand. It’s a very small country. At least the suburb that I lived in had a real mindset of why would anyone try to do anything more? These are the things you are expected to like and that really kind of just put me in a place of always feeling very outside. I think you can really see in all the stuff that I did as a child very little of which is available in the world.

The stuff that I have shown people is very much about someone who is unhappy, someone who is looking for something more magical, and there are pretty consistently stories about my desire to become a ghost at some point because that’s absolute freedom. Then I’d get into the complicated nature of being a ghost… one of my favorite activities is playing on a slide and you really can’t do that as a ghost because there’s just no tension there.

A lot of that time it’s about looking at what is the world missing or what I would have wanted my younger self to have. I spent about 10 years working almost exclusively in children’s books, picture books, and all ages horror comics. During that time, I was very clearly writing books for 8 to 12 year-old Richard. You look at the work I’m doing now and these books are more for people who I want to hang out with now to enjoy.

I realize I’ve made enough stuff for a kid Richard. He can get over it and find his own shit to read. I’m going to make books for the cool grown-ups who I want to hang out with because I really don’t want to be hanging out with cool grown-ups talking about a 10-year-old’s trauma at a spooky beach.

As we talk about these different eras in my career, I have been doing the Richard Sucks stuff now for two and a half years. I think there’s 28 books in the series in that publishing line. And I was really feeling like this is a slow build. It’s a niche market. it’s weirdo shit. And then three months ago at a convention, I was at an afterparty. We were all having to sign and do remarques on posters for the show. And someone asked me to do a remarque. I said, “Sure. What do you want me to draw?” And he said, “I don’t know.” And a friend of mine leaned back in his chair and yelled loudly, “Richard’s really good at drawing dicks.” That night I drew 57 dicks on Fan Expo posters.

And so now I’m in this weird phase where I’m doing two more memoirs this year at least because they’re sort of already underway. I’ve got this sapphic teen witchcraft thing. And then, at the same time, I’m also branching out.

I got this whole new line called Dicks by Richard because I draw really good dicks for people. I’m trying to figure out if I want to do a book called The Dick Pics of Dorian Gay, which I think will come out later this year. I think a lot about when you go on any dating app and you start seeing the same profile pictures over and over again. You realize there are these people who haven’t updated their profile pictures for years and they just become invisible. I want to do the reverse of that of someone whose Grinder pics are aging while they don’t.

I’m working on a new thing called Bob Dylan Sopranos McDonald’s or BDSM for short, which is about the importance of the value of a name and how a name when it becomes linked to something more famous the original meaning gets lost. Bob Dylan is named for Dylan Thomas, but everyone named Dylan is just named after Bob Dylan. You don’t hear soprano without thinking of Tony Soprano instead of the singer. You don’t hear about McDonald without thinking of the popular burger restaurant. And my mother can’t think of me as being called Richard without being reminded that she did name me after her abusive father.

And so, how famous do I have to become as Richard before—or at least how much do I have to identify myself as a new version of Richard—before my mother stops being terrified of me on some subconscious level? So, fun light stuff.