Comics get serious with Ivan Brunetti. Though Fantagraphics just released the eagerly awaited fourth edition of his "Schizo" comic book series and his comics have been regularly published by the Chicago Reader and New City over the past 16 years, it's been more of a moonlighting gig. Much like quiet cartooning genius, Harvey Pekar of American Splendor, Brunetti's day jobs (working in web design and production) had long overshadowed his cartooning life.
But when Chris Ware, famous author of "Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth," was unable to accept the offer of editing first comprehensive anthology of comics, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, to be published by Yale University Press in September 2006, Brunetti was the first of his cartooning friends he thought to recommend. With all of his cartooning experience, teaching gigs (a graphic novel writing course at his alma mater, the University of Chicago) and self-deprecating humor (a la R. Crumb), Brunetti was probably the man for the job all along. I recently caught up with the quiet cartooner over Thai food to dish on his theory of the primordial doodle:
Centerstage: What are comics are all about?
Brunetti: It's one person's vision of life and how they experience it. Comics can capture the exterior and interior reality. You can create your own world with comics. There is a very monastic quality to being a cartoonist. It takes a lot of long hours of staring at a table. One color page can take up to 30 hours to make.
Centerstage: How are you organizing An Anthology of Graphic Fiction?
Brunetti: It's organized sort of like the classes I've been teaching, from simplicity to complexity. We start with doodles, then move to one-panel cartoons, and then to four-panel strips, and then to full-page, multi-panel compositions, and then to longer and longer stories. Along the way, I subdivide things by genre: autobiography, biography, journalism, fiction, what have you. Ultimately, all you have is your intuition. I tried organizing everything chronologically and then moved toward a more intuitive approach and then let the work organize itself, in a way.
Centerstage: For the preview exhibit "The Cartoonist's Eye" at Columbia College this fall you gathered together and displayed 250 cartoon works by 75 artists, including some of the most notable artists working in the field. How did you make it come together?
Brunetti: I have a lot of contacts because of the book. And a lot of people I knew already; a lot of the work came from other cartoonists or was on loan from collectors.
Centerstage: Is there any common characteristic that you think groups all cartoonists together?
Brunetti: We have OCD problems. Sometimes it's more of a benefit than a hindrance. A lot of cartoonists collect things. That's an example of the OCD thing: everybody putting things together in categories with a need to organize. You're trying to almost reorder reality.
Centerstage: How did you begin creating comics?
Brunetti: I've been drawing since I was four years old. I learned to read by looking at comics and wanting to figure out what was happening. This then led to copying drawings from comic books, which got to be more and more of an obsession as time went on. I was heavily discouraged by my family, so I would quit drawing for long periods of time but I would get back to it eventually.
Centerstage: Is there a "child-like" quality to comics, or do people mistake "creativity" for a child-like quality?
Brunetti: I think cartoonists are usually attracted to comics from a very young age. Something just clicked for them. Creativity is sort of related to child-like thinking in the sense that you have to have an open mind and a sense of play and experimentation to create anything. That's true of anything, though. You have to let yourself abandon rigid thinking and preconceived ideas, otherwise how could you let anything creative pop into your head?
Centerstage: Do you think comics are gaining a mainstream audience?
Brunetti: I think movies like Crumb and American Splendor have helped. Someone can relate more to a Crumb story than to Superman. I think things are changing and things will shake out okay for comics. It takes less time for me to explain to people what I do than it used to. Crumb may be the only person they've heard of, but they have a reference. Chris Ware was in the Whitney Biennial and he has won the Guardian prize for fiction. Things are slowly changing.
Centerstage: Are you going to do a book signing or any local publicity to promote Schizo
Brunetti: I haven't decided yet. I have been asked to do a signing at Quimby's and at Comix Revolution in Evanston. I may do one, both or neither. It all depends on whether or not the printer screwed up the book and how happy or unhappy I am with the final product. If it's badly printed I will hide in my apartment indefinitely and not do any signings. And cry.
Click To View Full Screen 
For more info on this artist check out www.ivanbrunetti.com.
