Lick My Prison Pit

By Nick Gazin

Vice

Vice

Angry Youth Comix

Portajohnny, What’re You Looking At?!, The Comic Book Holocaust

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Prison Pit

Prison Pit

Vice: Prison Pit is great. There’s some of your trademark humor (“Why does everything smell like burnt jizz?”), but the pacing is different and your graphic sense is really strong.

Johnny Ryan:

Oz

Angry Youth Comix

Prison Pit

Were you influenced by the cinematic style of storytelling that you see in those corny mangas you claim to love?

Berserk

I never heard of Benjamin Marra until last week and now I’ve heard his name like five times. Who is Ben Marra?

Benjaminmarra.com

OK. This is the first time you’ve done a proper graphic novel. Did you just wake up one morning and realize you were a homosexual sellout or was it something that came to you gradually?

Interview not over. This is your first for-real graphic novel. Why did you finally decide to do one?

I have that same problem of getting bored too easily. People will say to me, “I bet you’re never bored,” when really I am always on the verge of killing myself out of boredom.

My circus mustache is outdone by my crazy circus penis. Speaking of kooky dongs, there’s a page in Prison Pit where it’s just a shot of the main character’s dick, all spiked and looking like a cudgel. Did you ever see that book of Pettibon drawings where it’s just penis shadows? Were you thinking about Pettibon at all while you worked on this?

Are you going to release a lot of volumes of Prison Pit? Was Angry Youth Comix just a warm-up for your massive magnum opus?

Whaddya want?! I’ve interviewed you twice already and I knew everything I needed to know before I asked the first question.

I still don’t know about Marra because you won’t tell me about him. I’m not going to run a URL as an answer!

How much of a Superjail! knockoff would you say this book is?

How are you feeling these days?

No. What were you talking about?

What crime did the main character commit to get tossed in the Prison Pit?

He reminds me of Lobo and Snake Plissken mixed together with a healthy dose of swiping from Superjail! Does he have a name?

You don’t like Garth Ennis? Did you read Preacher? It’s right up your alley!

Preacher

You gonna get raped in Garth Ennis’s alley.

I majored in alley-knowledge theory. I can talk endlessly about alleys, the video game Alleyway, and Gasoline Alley.

I spend about a minute and a half on my mustache per day. People ask me about that a lot. How much time did you spend on Prison Pit? Please use mustaches as a unit of time in your answer.

No.

No, but food and drink stirrers sometimes get lodged in that business.

It does attract kids, but they say I remind them of the guy in that children’s book who sells hats and then monkeys steal his hats.

Borat. When I lived in Hell’s Kitchen a bunch of black middle school kids saw me and enthusiastically started yelling, “Borack! Yo, Borack!” and one of them looked at me and earnestly asked, “Yo… ARE you Borack?” I had a similar experience after I moved to Brooklyn with some Polish kids who were a little younger.

No. But one time a drunk English guy paid me a dollar to pull it and he almost tore it out of my face.

Yes, I hold on to the tendrils like they’re prison bars and there are hatch marks on my cheeks counting the days I’ve been in the joint.

The stink it produces usually keeps all three at a safe distance.

I didn’t. Tell me what else you know about Craig Yoe.

Bowl Cut Boy Brides

Hey, you and I don’t just have a fan-cartoonist relationship or an interviewer-interviewee relationship. We’re also Flickr and LiveJournal friends. Have you ever gotten ideas for your comics from anything I’ve posted?

Superjail!

That’s a good note to end this interview with, I think.

Number one: The Love Guru. When this movie came out, the local deli put up the newspaper ad with “Nick?” written over the title. If that movie hadn’t flopped I’d probably still have the comparisons being made. But you’re going to have to finish this list for me. I don’t watch that many movies.

I do not normally read poetry because I am not a faggot.

I got asked that once by a cross-dresser in the West Village. Are you a cross-dresser?

I don’t buy comic books because I do not like them.

I used to pay for comics but haven’t in the past two or three years.

Frost/Nixon

I am afraid that if I shave it off, people will see how ugly I got in between the time I grew it and now. Also, they will not remember who I am.

Buy

from fantagraphics.com whenever it comes out. October, I think.