

Advertisement
Zack Soto: I started sg12 back in… 2001? I was studying printmaking at LSU and trying to do as many comics as my school workload would allow. It didn't allow for a whole lot, but I really wanted to put out a book and I was also really into posting on the tcj.com message board (back before it became a complete cesspool) and had met a bunch of pretty talented people through the message board APA, "Shiot Crock." I basically decided to put together the sg12 anthology because I figured out that while people won't check out a mini comic by some dude they'd never heard of, they'll be a lot more interested in checking out a mini with 15 people they'd never heard of. I also felt like there weren't any anthologies that had a mix of comics and just straight drawing/art like I wanted to see, so I got a lot of my fellow art students and faculty to contribute various pieces to each issue. You know, it was before Kramers 4 came out and blew everyone's mind with full-on art explosions next to d&d comics, so that kind of approach seemed novel to me. Anyhow, the first issue was incredibly rough, but the response was good. Every issue I tried to up the ante as far as both content and presentation--they all had silkscreened covers, but the first one was a pamphlet, the second was a hand-done perfect-binding, and the third was like a giant chipboard notebook. The quality of the work seemed to mostly improve with each successive issue too, so that helped.
Advertisement

The board came up like 8 years ago or so because Jeff Levine's semi-private board, which had a group of mainly cartoonists posting on it, went tits up and I wanted to keep the flame alive. It was just a place to talk about whatever without worrying about getting yelled at by jerks or dealing with a lot of the signal-to-noise ratio problems that most other comics boards seemed to have. The sg12 board wasn't even private until it got hacked by some spammers. After that I walled it off and it seemed like even more of an oasis for a while. It's pretty low traffic these days, made sort of superfluous by the facebook, but it's nice to have a place to shoot the breeze with that particular crowd. In its heyday it was really fun and there is still lots of good information/tech talk, etc. archived there.Study Group 12 was also one of the first anthologies to publish Victor Cayro's work.
I might be mistaken, but sg12 #2 might be the first time he'd had his stuff published by anyone besides himself? Again, I met him via the tcj message board. I loved his stuff, but some people were put off by it, due to the extreme nature of the imagery, or sometimes even the extreme nature of his internet persona. I think USS Catastrophe actually passed on carrying that issue in their distro just because of his story. My favorite piece of his is still "UNHOLY LOADS" from Legal Action Comics 2.
Advertisement

I actually have no idea what this means… Did you write this letter? Or did Victor? I complained a lot about the girls in my school in the 90s too. The only comic book letter column letter I ever wrote was to Pete Bagge. I sent him a comic that was also a letter and he was kind enough to print one of the panels in HATE #11. That guy is a saint. Except that he kept the weird syntax of my comic intact when he reprinted the words, so it seemed like I was learning disabled or something.

Man, when I was a teenager, I did SO MANY COMICS! I was a supremely unpopular kid in small town Louisiana, so all through my junior high and early high school years I just holed up in my room drawing and trying to work shit out. In my Junior year I went to this state magnet school--LSMSA, for "gifted and talented" kid--and I was suddenly sort of popular, girls were trying to get MY attention and shit. Needless to say, it was hard to focus on comics when you're making out with girls and doing drugs and ditching school for the first time all at the same time. (It's also hard to stay in school when you're doing all that, so I got kicked out.) Anyway, I was still drawing a lot after that but I was mainly focusing on having fun and doing fun things. I would be a much better artist today if I'd never gotten laid. Right before I went to college I realized I'd wasted lots of time and went to art school to try to get my shit together. A little after that, I realized that I'd sold myself out by not pursuing comics as hard as my teenaged self, so I started doing stuff in "Shiot Crock" and trying to get my stuff in various anthologies.
Advertisement

Secret Voice was a casualty of a few factors. The basic deal is that IA) procrastinate too much and
B) get really bad anxiety.I finished the first one and kind of freaked out about comics. And then because I was freaking out about comics, and the potential sophomore slump and all that, I blew my deadlines. Then because of my extreme anxiety about the whole situation, I wasn't able to communicate my situation to my publisher, Adhouse, and they, quite rightly, wrote me off. Chris Pitzer is one of those "nicest dudes in comics" guys, so you know if you're fucking up with him, you're fucking wayyy up. I still feel bad about that.After I blew it, I shelved SV for a couple years until about a year or so ago, when I suddenly had this epiphany and rewrote the whole thing and added parts and came up with a much more complex structure for the story, etc. I've been mostly writing it and making notes for it for the last year or so, and in the last couple months I've been drawing and inking it again. It's pretty exciting. The whole Secret Voice thing is probably going to be like 300 pages or so. As of now, I'm going to be doing it as a webcomic on studygroup12.com and I'll have some other amazing artist friends doing webcomics there too, so it's just going to be part of the next iteration of sg12. Planning on a spring launch.

Yeah I think it's been about 6 years since the last one? I got tired of doing them for a while, but once I wasn't curating shows at the Pony Club Gallery anymore I got the bug to put out another book. My original idea was that this would be super easy to make, I'd just silkscreen some stuff and xerox the rest, and somehow it got to be a big fancy book with a spine and I got a co-publisher. As far as your stuff, I like the way you draw and I like your comic in the new sg12, but I'm really glad you cut off that fucking mustache.Eat my dick, but so am I.INTERVIEW BY NICHOLAS GAZIN
