Creating Comics!

66

Creating Comics

G

lenn Head was born 1958 in Morristown, New

Jersey, and grew up nearby. After graduating

high school, he attended the Cleveland Insti-

tute of Art, the Art Students League of New York, and the

School of Visual Arts, where he studied for three years

and was taught by, among others, Art Spiegelman, which

was an invaluable experience. Head studied the history of

comics and attended workshops in cartooning, which cov-

ered all the basics—writing, drawing, plotting, lettering,

and inking. He also learned about printing and distribu-

tion, and how to self-publish and get his work into stores.

Since leaving art school, Head’s comics and illustrations

have been published in various newspapers and

magazines, including the Wall Street Journal, the

New York Press, Screw magazine, Nickelodeon Magazine,

Walt Disney Magazine, the New Republic, and the

Village Voice. His work has also appeared in R. Crumb’s

Weirdo magazine.

In the 1990s, with fellow cartoonist Kaz, Head edited the

three issues of Fantagraphics’ comics anthology Snake

Eyes. Also with Fantagraphics, he put out three solo books:

Avenue D, and Guttersnipe 1 and 2.

Currently, Head edits and contributes to Fantagraphics’

Hotwire Comics, an anthology of new work by some of

today’s best cartoonists. Hotwire Vol. 1 was nominated for

the 2006 Eisner and Harvey Awards for Best Anthology.

Glenn Head

67

Title: Booze/Drugs

Client: Hotwire Comics Vol. 2, 2008

Media: Brush and pen on paper, Photoshop

Creative Process

The art I make often requires various processes. For the two-

page spread “Booze/Drugs,” preliminary sketches of many

characters were done long before the piece was started. They

came wholesale from my imagination and personal life, rather

than any source material.

Once I’d completed many thumbnail studies, I chose several

characters that seemed to be interrelated. The characters

seemed to have a kind of high-energy, drugged-out craziness.

I knew these would work well together in a full-page piece.

Starting with a character in the lower right, I developed a

sweating, blinking, greasy-haired junkie character, a flying head

with a syringe in his tongue, swirling manically out of a garbage

can. (In drug lingo, someone like this is called a garbage head.)

Having developed this character and a background crack house

scene, the challenge was to develop an interesting composition.

With a drawing of this type, which is about a kind of visual

excitement and anarchy, there is still a need for control. In this

case, I achieved it by working out a cycle of energy. The motion

of the garbage-head character leads to the electrified female

lightning bolt character, which leads to the martini drinker,

whose whiskey bottle pours onto the tongue of the smashed,

swirling light bulb—whose trail leads to the man throwing it at

the garbage can lid.

What appears at first glance to be purely anarchic actu-

ally follows a pattern, a circular motion of psychotic behavior.

This approach was also used for the booze half of the piece.

In fact, the drawing here was intended as a counterpoint to

drugs. Here, in place of the garbage head is the boozehound

that comes flying out of the pages of the Alcoholics Anonymous

Big Book. Here again we see a cycle of bad behavior from the

swirling boozehound, to the other flying, peppy drunks, to the

cop smashing through a window—it’s a never-ending cycle of

drunken mayhem.

This picture shows a kind of duality, because the drinking

seems to be taking place not in a bar, but in an Alcoholics Anon-

ymous meeting. There seems to be a yin-yang involved here. On

the one hand the boozers are drunken, happy, crazy, and funny,

and yet the following morning seems to beckon. In this case it

seems that the cycle of bad behavior may be followed by an-

other cycle of slogan mongering, rule following, brainwashing,

and going-out-for-coffee fellowship. In fact, the bad behavior

and the recovery seem to be happening simultaneously, remind-

ing us that you can’t have one without the other.

Clenn Head

New York Press, Screw magazine, Nickelodeon Magazine,

Walt Disney Magazine, the New Republic, and the

Village Voice. His work has also appeared in R. Crumb’s

Weirdo magazine.

In the 1990s, with fellow cartoonist Kaz, Head edited the

three issues of Fantagraphics’ comics anthology Snake

Eyes. Also with Fantagraphics, he put out three solo books:

Avenue D, and Guttersnipe 1 and 2.

Currently, Head edits and contributes to Fantagraphics’

Hotwire Comics, an anthology of new work by some of

today’s best cartoonists. Hotwire Vol. 1 was nominated for

the 2006 Eisner and Harvey Awards for Best Anthology.

Glenn Head