>> *spark-online8.0

http://www.spark-online.com

online dreaming and cartooning with chris romano

by austin english

Chris Romano is a cartoonist who doesn't fit any definitions that the general public has for cartoonists. In other words, he's like countless other talented cartoonists: creating original, personal work, in a medium that is not associated with such work.

Romano writes and draws a strip that is entirely computer generated, called "Dreamboy". The strip creates a bizarre fusion of images and dialogue, which at first glance do not seem to fit together, but ultimately cannot be separated. The strip is (in Romano's words ) "autobiographical", and while this fact may not be obvious, the personal themes and raw emotion presented within cannot be mistaken.

Romano publishes his cartoon online at , but he has also done work for MTV, and also published a book. He is a skilled in a variety of mediums, and it was a pleasure to interview him over a series of e-mail.

DREAMBOY FUNNIES

(Austin English for *spark-online) Where and when were you born?

(Chris Romano) I was born in New Jersey, in 1968. And lived there until my family moved to Los Angeles, when I was 16. In August 2000, I'll have been in Los Angeles for 16 years, too, making me 50% east coast and 50% west coast.

(A.E.) What kind of place was the area you grew up in? What was it like to live there?

(C.R.) It was very suburban and middle class, with a good dose of white trash thrown in. I didn't realize it then...but within 5 years after having moved away, it became very apparent. It was all right growing up...there were a lot of neighborhood kids. I played a lot of sports and wasted a lot of money on video games and bad music. When I was 14, I liked the Scorpions! That's not an easy thing to admit.

(A.E.) What was your first exposure to comics?

(C.R.) I had an Uncle who'd drop off shopping bags full of beat up comics every few months. A lot of old Marvel stuff. I remember being around 11 or 12 and thinking "The Vision" was really cool. I didn't collect comics then, however. I just read whatever was in the bag and watched a lot of superhero cartoons on television--A lot of SuperFriends. My little brother and I had a lot of those old Mego superhero action figures. I remember Thor had long blonde hair, like Barbie.

I didn't start actively read comics until I was 16. In the months before I moved to Los Angeles, my best friend Brian Barclay started pushing comics on me. I was interested in a lot of science fiction-ish type of stuff. I remember reading GRIMJACK and AMERICAN FLAGG! and DC's STAR TREK.

I didn't have any friends when I moved to Los Angeles...it was right before 11th grade...so I would spend a lot of time reading comic books. I think within a few months of living in Los Angeles, I was buying and reading around 30 different titles a month. That's a lot of comic books!

For some reason I was a huge GREEN LANTERN fan. Within a two year period, I bought all the Silver Age GREEN LANTERN comics.

(A.E.) Dreamboy seems to me to have certain political leanings, although I may be wrong. What was your first exposure to politics as a kind?

(C.R.) Politics, huh?

I just rifled through all the comics I've posted to see what might get you thinking that way, but I can't really see it. I'm an ardent capitalist...that's for sure. And when I was in college, doing my undergraduate studies at UCLA, I was a big Libertarian, but that was a long time ago. I recently read through all the platform positions posted at the Libertarian Party web site, and I just had to shake my head in disappointment. But that's a whole can of worms in and of itself.

I'd be interested in what makes you think this way. Unless, of course, you're talking about politics in the more general sense...like the politics of relationships or the politics of art making or something like that. I'm very reactionary and I've always been a bit of a trouble-maker. I'm obsessed with my short-comings and flaws and insecurities, along with everyone else's, and I find myself trying to poke fun at anything and everything I can.

Politically, I'm a bit of a fascist. I believe in a lot of personal and economic freedoms, but only for those who deserve it! Most people don't.

(A.E.) What I meant in reference to politics, was that the issue the characters discuss are so basic, and I though some of it was meant as social commentary...like it was meant to mirror modern society, etc. Any thoughts on that take?

(C.R.) I'm reluctant to say that I'm socially minded. I have to be honest. Although I do speak in metaphor a lot, even in casual conversation. I have a tendency to indirectly refer to people or things, particularly when something's bothering me or if I'm launching a criticism.

I'm pretty openly against political correctness and socialist ideology, too, so that might find it's way into what I'm spouting. I'm a product of "modern society," certainly, so at least to that extent I mirror it.

Social commentary and politics aren't something I have on my checklist when I'm writing.

(A.E.) When did you begin drawing, or become interested in art?

(C.R.) I grew up in an advertising environment. My father worked at J.Walter Thompson for most of my youth, and then moved on to some smaller ad agencies in Los Angeles. My father went to art school, of a sort, and my mother was kind of a Sunday painter. They really encouraged a lot of drawing from my earliest days. In high school I took a lot of art and some computer classes, so by the time college came around, studying art seemed like the most obvious option. I did my undergraduate fine art studies at UCLA and then studied fine art in grad school at ArtCenter in Pasadena.

My father made me swear to him that I would never get involved with advertising.

(A.E.) When did you decide you wanted to be a cartoonist? What were some of the things you did before Dreamboy? Where does the inspiration for Dreamboy come?

(C.R.) I've never made that decision, really. I've never considered or thought of myself as a cartoonist.

I wanted to be a painter, and only very recently abandoned the notion. Even through my first few years as an animator...I've been a working computer animator, now, for about 6 years...I thought I'd one day emerge as a painter. I had a loft space downtown and generated work like nobody's business. But I failed when it came to shopping myself around (I couldn't and didn't do it), so I stopped painting mainly because I ran out of room. I still have hundreds of paintings in storage.

Back in 1990, right before grad school, I started writing my dreams down in diary form. Every morning I'd strive to remember any dreams and I'd scribble down whatever I could. After a year, I had over 200 pages of dreams in short instalments. I tried to be as straightforward as possible, and didn't waste any time on interpretation or explanations. I wasn't interested. So, given all this text, I decided to self-publish the volume. The book is called DECEMBER 22, and there are still copies of it floating around.

I continued to write my dreams down for the next 5 years following, and stopped with about 800-900 unpublished pages, which are now tucked away on some CD-ROM somewhere.

I should point out that a very large percentage of my painting in and after grad school was comic book related or derivative. For instance, I have a lot of large-scale paintings of comic book explosions. I always thought a good comic book blast was like some kind of pre-teen, orgasmic release. And it was the part of comics which most resembled the interviews with DeKooning or any of the other abstract expressionists. Now, my paintings where very illustrative, but the effect, I had hoped, was something along the lines of a DeKooning or Franz Kline painting or something.

But even earlier, the summer before grad school, a large part of my work was centered on girls. Or women, or whatever you want to call them. I was 20, post-UCLA, pre-ArtCenter. And I had two jobs...one as an art handler at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and another at HiDeHo Comics in Santa Monica. Around that time I was painting bellybuttons. Large, round canvases with these flesh colored, abstract imagery. I was playing off of a lot of eastern philosophies of the navel as "your center" and relating them to a lot of abstract painting conversation...all the while keeping my true attention on girls. WooHoo!

Anyway, one day while at the comic book store, I saw a copy of Archie's BETTY AND VERONICA, and I was hooked! I thought Veronica Lodge was the absolute hottest thing on the planet and I decided to dedicate my work to her...so I started doing paintings and drawings of Veronica Lodge (my real life girlfriend just rolled her eyes at me). I had always been a pop art enthusiast...I was always looking at Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesley, Ruscha, Stuart Davis, Rosenquist and Jeff Koons (who was doing his Ciccolina work at the time), so the shift to almost pure comic book style imagery wasn't that big of a leap.

It's all coming back to me!

I had A LOT of work about Veronica and decided that it wasn't enough...I wasn't getting close enough to her, so I hunted down Dan Parent, who was drawing VERONICA comics for Archie Comics at the time, and I paid him to draw pictures of me and Veronica together. Images like the two of us walking hand in hand on the beach, me reading poetry to her in the park, the two of us in a row boat...very innocent and romantic. And then, to top it all off, I got him to slip me into ARCHIE AND FRIENDS #5. I still have a few copies of that issue, too. The second story in the comic is about a party at Veronica's house, and in the last panel, you can find me dancing with Betty Cooper. She wasn't Veronica, but I was dancing next to Veronica, so that was good enough! In the lower right hand corner of the panel, Jughead is eating a drippy hotdog, which pretty much just sums the whole thing up.

From that moment on, I was obsessed with being a cartoon character in my own right. I did a lot of performance work where I would assume this "CHRIS!" personality, with accompanying cartoon imagery, and I would hand out newsletters which were about "CHRIS!" I wanted comics and cartoons about "CHRIS!" All the performance work got under everyone's skin, as it was supposed to, and I intentionally ended up making a fool of myself in many ways.

UCLA had a high Asian population and ArtCenter had an even higher one, though at ArtCenter, it's like Asian-female central, which became this really weird obsession (both for me and others). That's really where the asian-female element worked its way into my work. One week, I wrote a one page personals ad about how "CHRIS!" wanted to meet nice Asian girls for love and friendship, and I walked around the entire campus handing the newsletters to all the Asian girls, personally. "Hi there, this is for you!"

It was perfect...I was standing around one day with some friends at school and this little Asian girl walked up to me and asked, in broken English, "Are you Clis?" When I said, "Yes," she just giggled and ran away! My friends were absolutely flabbergasted!

But yeah, I wanted to be a cartoon character, yet I was too lazy to draw them myself. That's why all my work is a product of the computer...I'm too lazy and too impatient to sit and draw. Plus now, I'm really out of practice. At the time there was no computer animation like there is now, so I tried recruiting Asian girls to draw the comics for me. I had two who were willing, but neither one actually produced any work. :(

Boy, I'm all over the place.

Now it's after graduate school. I'm at my first computer graphics company, working on a MORTAL KOMBAT cartoon, which I ALSO make a brief appearance in. Out of boredom, I design about 20-30 little cartoon faces. Heavily influenced by Hello Kitty and all that Sanrio stuff, I put the heads together in Fontographer and Adobe Illustrator. This is where the sources for DREAMBOY and BRIMSTONE and KLAUS all get designed.

Fast Forward a few more years. I've been a computer animator for some time, now, and I have a pretty good handle on it. I'm supervising on the movie VOLCANO, and I find myself with a lot of time on my hands. I'm best at using a software program called Prisms on the SGI. Once day I find out that Prisms can easily read in sound files. Around the same time, within about a month, I see SOUTH PARK'S "A Spirit of Christmas" for the first time...this is probably about 9-12 months before it gets picked up for television, I think. I also remember seeing a film festival for The Quay Brothers at that time. After seeing all that stop motion and low budget animation, I decide I should do something of my own, but what?

To advertise my book DECEMBER 22 over the internet, I produced 20+ issues of a monthly e-zine called "dreamboy!" which was basically two weeks worth of dream info. So I figured, given the 800+ pages of text I had written, I could get some stories out of there. I then dusted off the little characters I had designed during the MORTAL KOMBAT years. Since Prisms could read in EPS, I just used my Illustrator files. I bought a book on animation, made different mouth positions for my character, and I was off! I recorded dialog on my Mac, emailed the sound files to work, and then started animating.

That's how DREAMBOY got his start. The first cartoon was just a joke I heard. The next ones were 30 second dreams, and later appeared on MTV.

(A.E.) What I notice the most about Dreamboy, is that (and you mentioned this to me), it doesn't read like it looks. Why did you choose to use the computer generated type graphics to illustrate a series with more everyday, ordinary dialogue? Why not illustrate it in a more traditional way?

(C.R.) Call it a horrible sense of irony.

I think there's something very funny about cute cartoon characters contemplating their short-comings. Comic books and cartoons, with all their heavy outlines, are about idealization. Mickey Mouse is about as idealized as a mouse will ever get. No one has ever seen Mickey totally depressed because he has a small penis!

I think that's funny. Maybe I read too much Ziggy growing up?

After all that art school, I can't help but think about how to subvert any given thing. SOUTH PARK is as popular as it is because it's 180 degrees away from Charlie Brown. Snoopy caters to the innocence of our youth, while Cartman appeals to the angry adult who's unhappy because Snoopy's idealism isn't real.

I'm not a SOUTH PARK fan.

As I mentioned, I'm a computer animator by trade, and find myself working very easily on computers. Drawing is a chore. Besides, I originally started the comics at www.dreamboy.com to keep the characters in the public eye while I worked away on my most recent animated short, DREAMBOY AND THE CLAM. I finished THE CLAM about a month ago, and it took 17 months to complete. It's 24 minutes of fully animated CGI, featuring all the characters at dreamboy.com and then some. Producing a weekly strip at the same time allowed me to grow an audience and practice writing. The trailer for the short can be viewed at www.dreamboy.com/trailer.html.

(A.E.) Do you think this style might be confusing of off-putting to some people? What are it's benefits, disadvantages?

(C.R.) I don't really care. I mean, people are always going to be put off by something. If they're unable to get passed the look of the cartoon then they're not going to enjoy any of the content, either. As far as I'm concerned, I think the comics and the animation look pretty damn good. The writing might stink...but that's because writing is a lot harder. I'm very secure in the overall look of both the comics and the recent animated cartoon.

(A.E.) Dreamboy seems very personal. Is it at all autobiographical, in the themes and emotions it expresses?

(C.R.) It's completely autobiographical. I mean, I take everything to the extreme, of course, but it all stems from my own problems or issues. All that "fuck art" stuff comes out of jealousy. I still really want to be a painter, but I know there's no way I could lead the same lifestyle. Computer animation has been very good to me, financially. But mentally it's quite unfulfilling.

The cartoon is very self-absorbed, in that it reacts very much to itself. When DREAMBOY jumps in to yell "CUT" it's because I hate the story I'm writing and need to change it completely. Even if it's right in the middle. When the waitress cuts in a conversation to tell everyone to shut up, it's because I realize I've done something wrong that needs changing. And whenever Ivan is crying over women, it's because I've screwed something up in my personal life. It's all probably too auto-biographical, but at least now it has a cute cartoon face, as opposed to me walking around, handing out newsletters!

(A.E.) Dreamboy seems to me like you're trying to express emotion. Is this what you're getting at?

(C.R.) Sure.

I'm sort of obsessed with insecurities and people treating each other badly. I mean, I'm not interested in seeing people treat each other badly, but I am interested in how the victim feels. Particularly in the subtle ways, like when a friend or girlfriend says something that rubs you the wrong way, but you don't feel comfortable to say that your feelings have just been hurt. That interests me a lot. Or those embarrassing secrets you might have that no one knows and then someone casually hits on one in conversation and you have to pretend like it's funny when in actuality it's sort of hurtful.

(A.E.) How do you feel the strip progressing as you work on it more? It has a much more refined look now.

(C.R.) The look of things always progresses. I try to make each chapter look different than those which have came before it. Sometimes it's only subtle. But I like to play with the way the frames land on each page and proportions and that sort of thing.

Writing-wise, I'm just trying. I'm just trying to get a feel for it and figure out a way to work. I'm not terribly comfortable with it. Stories sometimes hit me and other times it's a total dry spell, but even when they hit me they're a chore. I sometimes try to produce something which will appeal to a larger audience, but I quickly become disinterested and disenchanted, and rush back to some kind of self-directed rant. Plus, the raving's of dreamboy or whomever generate the most responses...not that I get a lot of feedback, mind you, because I don't, but the babbling hits a chord with some people. That's at least something.

(A.E.) How do you produce the strip? How is it drawn...how much do you use a computer in it's creation?

(C.R.) The images are all done in a software package called Houdini (www.sidefx.com). There's no drawing involved. All my characters are already built, so I just position them and set their facial positions, animate a couple of frames for when I need motion blur, and then render them out. The still images are then taken into a program like Photoshop, where I add word balloons.

The comic is 100% computer generated.

(A.E.) What's it like having the strip on the Internet, as opposed to a regular print comic?

(C.R.) I very recently contemplating producing a DREAMBOY comic book, but abandoned the idea after talking with Jesse Reklaw (www.nondairy.com), who produced 6 issues of his own CONCAVE UP. The print runs on comics are too low and they're a total loss, financially. I reach a much wider audience on the Internet and it's all free. Plus, I can make the comics as long or as short as I like, as opposed to a 24 or 32 page format.

My comics are available to anyone with Internet access and a browser. AOL has something like 20 million subscribers, worldwide. I've never seen that many people at the comic book store. Essentially, my print run is greater than the X-MEN, SPAWN, and BATMAN all rolled into one!

v (A.E.) How did Dreamboy become involved with MTV?

(C.R.) An intern at MTV saw some animation at the D.Film festival in Manhattan. I gave her my number and they called me.

(A.E.) What was it like working for MTV?

(C.R.) Nothing. It was like nothing, really. I sent them a video, we argued over some contract details for a short period of time, and that was it. They sent me a few checks, and then Cartoon Sushi got cancelled.

(A.E.) Can you talk about cartooning versus animation?

(C.R.) Well, I produce the comics the same way I animate; only I'm generating just a frame here or there.

Comics are better because there's less work involved. And it's more dynamic because there's more freedom in the direction of things. With animation, you can't really work stream of conscious. In animation, I write dialog, re-write it, record it, lay it out, and then animate to the dialog. So by the time animation starts, everything is pretty much set in stone. But with comics, I can change any given storyline at any time and take it in a different direction. Less work means more freedom, in a way. Had Chapter Seven of the Internet comics been animated, I would've either finished the original story or shelved it, never to be seen again. The comics are made public before the end is even started! Animation has to be finished before being released.

That's a big difference.

(A.E.) What do you think about the status comics achieve in mainstream consciousness? Does it upset you that the work you do is lumped alongside Superman and Cathy?

(C.R.) The comic book industry is floundering, at least in the United States. The simulacra has taken affect, in that, people are more likely to enjoy parodies of comic books than comics themselves. You won't see my mother reading Captain America, for instance...yet she would read a Captain America parody in the newspaper or PEOPLE magazine, or something.

I think newspaper comics are great...they deliver humor and ideas in the quickest way possible. Plus their idealism is soothing. WILLY N ETHEL is a riot. I would give everything to be like Charles Schulz (except for the being dead part).

I wish people would lump me together with Superman and Cathy. Or Archie Comics. Instead, and it's obvious why, I conversationally sometimes get lumped in with Beavis and Butthead and South Park. That bothers me more. Well, I actually like Beavis and Butthead in small doses. I'm just trying to be a little smarter, which is probably my big flaw!

Comics will never be movies or animation because there's too much reading involved. Reading is off-putting in and of itself.

(A.E.) What do comics need to do to make themselves a respected medium? What do you do to help this? Who are some of your influences, or people whose work you're reading currently?

(C.R.) Newspaper comics are a respected medium, I think. Charles Schulz is a perfect example. If the Calvin and Hobbes guy didn't quit, he'd be right up there.

Comic books don't have a prayer. They're mired in adolescence. The only comics I still read are EIGHTBALL and MADMAN. EIGHTBALL because it's the best thing ever put out in comic book form and MADMAN because it's the epitome of comic book fun. But why Dan Clowes is writing comics over animation or TV is beyond me.

I like reading SCHIZO, too. Because it's so self-obsorbed and self-deprecating. I'm so into self-deprecation it's harmful! Comics are a catch 22. The best comics, like EIGHTBALL, are too alternative to appeal to the mainstream...which is one of the reasons why Clowes does what he does. Unfortunately, mainstream comics are too weak and boring to maintain their following. I picked up a CAPTIAN AMERICA comic at the newsstand in Target, just the other day, and it was painfully boring. BORING! It's a shame.

I have no idea if I'm helping comics. I don't think about it. I'm very self-absorbed, like a large majority of the dwindling, independent comic book market. Only I'm not writing and drawing bikini-wearing samurai teens battling ogres. If I can produce some great looking material with some interesting, atypical writing that speaks a mutually felt aspect of our lives, then I'm helping. If I can produce some entertaining material that makes people laugh and have fun and relate, then I'm helping. As long as I'm not producing utter garbage, there's no harm being done.

(A.E.) What are your future plans for Dreamboy?

(C.R.) As I mentioned, I just finished a 24 minute, animated short which my manager is shopping around town. I like it, but if I could do it over again, I would. It's my first effort at the longer format and I think it's a little slow in a few parts. It was a great learning experience. I have some more SHORT dreamboy cartoons on the drawing board, along with A LOT of other, non-dreamboy stuff. I'm also currently putting together an animation site, called SatanTV (www.satantv.com), which will feature 30-60 second animation from a stable of talent. I hope to have that up and running in full force by the end of the year.

Austin English was born in San Francisco where he continues to reside to this day. His interviews with alternative cartoonists have appeared throughout the Internet, most notably at www.indymagazine.com. He also has a self-published mini-comic entitled The Tenth Frame available for just $1.00. You can contact him at three1145@aol.com, or P.O. Box 460584 San Francisco, CA 94146-0584.