Farel Dalrymple Had Good, Clean Fun

Farel Dalrymple is a cartoonist who never seems to age and makes pretty good books. He first got noticed for his comic Popgun War, which he probably won awards for. He drew a somewhat stupid but well-drawn comic about the Jewish mafia called Caper. A year or two ago he drew a comic called Omega the Unknown for Marvel, which was written by Jonathan Lethem. That’s as much of his career as I know. I first got to know Farel when he worked at Alt.Coffee. Farel’s buddies would sit at the counter by the cash register and draw with him until he had to get back to work or poke homeless people to see if they were still alive. Farel’s drawing career took off and he was able to leave his job at the coffee place. He soon got sick of New York and left that place too. He lives in Portland now and I never see him anymore. I miss seeing Farel around and the period of my life where I looked up to him.

VICE: Tell me about what you were like growing up. FAREL: I was brought up as an evangelical-style good Christian kid in Tulsa, Oklahoma, although I had a lot of negative run-ins with teachers and authority figures. I was always at a loss as to what I did wrong. Maybe I was just too weird for the Midwest. I was a pretty quiet, shy, and severely dorky. I spent a lot of time in front of the TV or shut up in my room. Definitely an indoor kid. Are you still evangelical? Hell no. I was thoroughly deprogrammed after my first few years living in New York. I have absolutely no interest in any sort of organized religion. Both my siblings also left all that stuff behind when we got off the Christian subculture. How’d you get into comics? I started reading comics at a pretty young age. I had an older friend that always had copies of Rom: Spaceknight and Micronauts around. I started self publishing right after I finished my stint at the School of Visual Arts. It was a 40-page senior thesis project called Smith’s Adventures in the Supermundane. Dave Roman and John Green from Cryptic Press helped me out a lot and showed me the ropes at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda. The second book I published, Pop Gun War, received a Xeric Grant. That seemed to get some good response from people. And from that I got a phone call from Diana Schutz at Dark Horse Comics, who offered me some commercial work. I guess that started the proverbial ball rolling. Tell me about the early comics you made. I used to make comics in spiral notebooks when I was in grade school. There was one I called Beware: Danger. It was a silly secret agent spy comic a la Nick Fury. My first commercial work was when I was 16 and it was for a Christian comic called Behold: 3-D. It was in 3D. I believe I gave you a copy of that. I didn’t have any printed comic work until I put stuff in the SVA radio station zine about ten years later. Pop Gun War is the first comic of yours I ever saw when I met Tomer Hanuka and Stardog at a comic convention. They told me about the School of Visual Illustration program that you had attended and that I ended up attending. What were you like when you went to SVA? Stephen Stardog and I used to pal around a lot and were roommates for a while. He is a great guy. Same goes for Tomer, but I didn’t really get to know him until close to the end of my senior year. I remember seeing his work in the annual portfolio show and having my socks knocked off. I made a point to go talk to him because of that. I was pretty religious my first couple years at SVA, but I don’t think I came off very judgmental or anything like that. At least I hope I didn’t. I was pretty outgoing, made a lot of excellent friends, and had a bunch of good clean fun while I was there. But I was a total dork and completely uncool. I was a bit older than most of the other students but felt like I was still a teenager. I looked up to a lot of the other people I went to school with. I worked at the school radio station and hung around the student association office a lot. I was poor, always trying to scam free food or photocopies or whatever from the school. I felt since I was paying so much money to go to school there I really wanted to suck the marrow out of that place. The religious aspect kept me from losing a lot of work time drinking or doing drugs. I think I had a better work ethic then. I remember pulling at least two all-nighters a week doing homework. I would never do anything like that now. No assignment is worth me losing sleep anymore. I am also way less social now, to the point of being a hermit. I remember drinking my first beer my senior year. But I waited until after I graduated to do any major partying. What is Pop Gun War about? Where’d it come from? Pop Gun War is mostly about Sinclair, a child with wings on his back who flies around this strange city and gets into adventures with strange characters who inhabit the city. He has a sister in a rock band and his best friend is this older homeless guy. Pop Gun War is about childhood, loneliness, magic, and what weird places cities are. It is sort of a whimsical children’s story with a few dark corners. One time I went to a panel discussion and the host asked you why you made the main character black. Do you get asked that question a lot? No, not very much, but a lot of people, when they meet me, are surprised I am not black. That is something that never occurred to me when I was making that book. It still seems rather strange to me. Maybe most writers make the main characters in their stories look just like they do. Tell me about Smith’s Adventures in the Supermundane, a comic which you still sometimes draw comics about. It’s about an indie rockish looking child who seems to usually be riding on a zepplin driven by a surly, fat, bald man and the interactions he has with the other passengers on and off of the zeppelin. It’s a lot like dreams I have. I’m sure it’s like dreams that everyone has. Supermundane is the strip and came out of that 40-page senior thesis project. Originally, in the comic book, it was just about this weird kid escaping this David Lynch-type asylum place. I am not sure where I got the whole floating around in the airship thing. At first it was just an attempt to do a regular online comic strip but I was never able to master the “regular” part. So I just do a strip every once in a great while when the mood strikes me. And the characters seem to pop up in other things that I do for anthologies or whatever. I wanted the strips to be sort of funny but they always seem to come out sort of sad. It’s just that character, I guess. He seems like a kid you just feel sorry for. Yeah, and it is total dream logic. All my stories are that way, really. I don’t think I could do realism very well, so all my stuff has a fantasy element to it. It is more fun for me that way. What was it like working with Jonathan Lethem on Omega: The Unknown? You both use Brooklyn in your work a lot. It was great. That guy is a great writer. It was cool for me especially because I was a fan of his books before ever being contacted by him. I remember reading Motherless Brooklyn while I was living in Carroll Gardens and recognizing the streets and places he was talking about. Before drawing the book, Jonathan and I went on a photo safari around Washington Heights and Inwood in Manhattan, where the story was set. That was pretty invaluable to me as an artist on the series. Some of those scripts were so specific about the locations down to the exact street corner, I don’t know how I would have drawn the book without that field trip since I wasn’t living in New York when I started drawing it. Jonathan’s scripts were a pleasure to read and an intense challenge to draw from. I enjoyed the challenge though. Is it strange to have so many of your comics based in Brooklyn when you no longer live here? Are you still doing stuff set in Brooklyn? Not really. Most of my own stuff is set in fictional locations. But the city I live in does influence the look and feel of the story for sure. Pop Gun War was in a big inspired by my living in New York. The city itself is sort of a character in the story. Now that I am living in Portland some of this place is creeping into The Wrenchies. I can’t help it. What’s the Wrenchies about? The Wrenchies is a post-apocalyptic, science fiction, fantasy, super-hero, secret agent coming-of-age epic with some existential bullshit thrown in. The Wrenchies are these children in a screwed up futuristic world who resurrect ancient heroes also called the Wrenchies. The whole thing was brought into being by a demon slayer named Sherwood, who opened a door to a secret world when he was a boy. The story is really about this kid Sherwood who has this crazy adventurous life but is now sort of a stoner asshole who causes the entire world to go to crap. It sounds really convoluted but hopefully it will be radical when I am finished with it. I heard something about a Pop Gun War movie. Is that still in the works? A writer/director friend of mine was playing with the idea of doing it as a movie a while back but he got involved with another project. I think he is thinking about pitching it as a cable series now. I have been approached by a couple of Hollywood types in the past, before giving Pop Gun War to my buddy, but it always seemed like total horseshit to me. One producer guy made the genius suggestion that Sinclair’s mom should be a crackhead. No kidding. Not that I am too precious about my book being made into some Hollywood whatever, but I had to wonder if that guy even read Pop Gun War. That business seems like such a strange cheesy world to me. I try not to get distracted by that sort of thing though. It is so hard for me to stay focused on doing comics I can barely even bring myself to check my e-mail every week. I don’t really spend any time thinking about my work being translated into other mediums. The money would be nice though.