A conversation with Sergio Zuniga and Nick Choban on memory, the peculiarities of authorship and comic books - NEW YORK.USA

27 OCTOBER 2009

Interviewed by JON LANGLEY

    Memory can be a pretty funny thing, to which anyone whose ever been overtaken by Proustian moments of coffee soaked madeleines can attest (a strange cultural memory many of us seem to share considering how few have actually read Proust). Memory, both personal and cultural, resonates everywhere whether we acknowledge its reverb drenched presence or not, whether we float by in sublime unawareness on its zenith, cringe in monolithic, nadiral despair, or glissando between the extremes, a spatio-temporal locus in transit. Some drown, some drift, some build great machines in an attempt to control the oscillations (and this, of course, doesn't really work, but like inmates with bloody fingers and a spoon, we try anyway), and some, in a strange combination of all three, simply write about it. Amongst this crowd there are some, whose attempt to translate the narrative of existence into something tangible, whose fixation (whether conscious or not) on control and representation leads to their questioning whether they're the ones writing or the ones being written, and whose desire to shock is only trumped by the almost paralyzing shock of real life horror, create comic books. Now that the pedantic melodrama is out of the way, we can get down to the heart of these fine gentlemen and their work.

Sergio Zuniga:

                   A part of me wants to see this motherfucker. I could go to Rikers and see him in front of my face and talk to him. When I was seeing a shrink, she told me I should do that. I should go and meet the guy that killed my father.

This article was originally intended to be more of a proper interview, you know, the kind with clever, insightful questions and well thought out, intelligent answers concerning topics such as aesthetics, form, the place of comics in the art world, etc. During the first hour of the evening, however, I realized that the conversation had mostly focused on topics that, in some attempt to salvage both my own dignity and the dignity of these guys, I won't relate. It became fairly apparent that "proper interview" wasn't gonna work out on this one. The details and the article would have to work themselves out later.
 

At the tail end of these initial stories, after we finished talking about the various pros and cons of kalimotxo, the conversation veered quite abruptly into a new book that Sergio is working on, one that deals with the murder of his father. As the story goes, a cousin murdered Sergio's father when Sergio was six years old. Sergio was told his father died in a car accident and didn't find out until many years later what had actually happened and he now finds himself in the strange position of dealing with the impact and existence (or lack thereof) of a man he only knew for 6 years of his life, of dealing with his relationship with his mother, and of dealing with having his father's murderer share his last name. He's decided to do this (with Prometheus Choban providing the a flicker of proverbial fire under his posterior) in comic book form. The obvious choice right?

If we think of the history of alternative comics out there (Art Spiegelman's Maus being the obvious reference here) this actually isn't that far of a stretch of the imagination. Comics allow the author an entirely different mode of representation, an intertwining of both the iconographic, in the creation of a lexicon of images that potentially have direct visual corollaries in the real world, and the scriptory, in that comic artist are generally not afforded the same amount of physical space to allot to words and have to operate with some sense of restraint (unlike your verbose author here). These two are, to some extend, dependent on one another in order to create flow (be it narrative or otherwise), though as Nick says "you can have comics without words, but you can't have one without pictures." Within this flow, one can hope to interweave some echo of memory, some representation that works both to convey the event itself and to allow the author to be satisfied in some sense with his manhandling of something so important to him. Sergio flat out refuses to draw his father, thus negating any sort of realistic representation and has instead come to the idea that drawing his father as a silhouette will allow him to balance the need for an essential distance from the reality of the event and the need to manifest the ghost of his father in some way. Sergio's memory of choice to start off the piece?
 

Sergio Zuniga:

                    It's me as a little kid picking my nose, and... my dad comes and is like 'Hey! don't pick your nose. Thats...you don't do that.' And you know I'm like 'sorry... sorry' and then he walks around, goes to the TV, watching the Mets game and he starts picking his nose. I wanna start with that memory. Cause I kinda wanna make it funny.

Sergio's books explode with humor (well they do if you're into his particular form of funny, but I'll be getting to that in a few sentences) and this is the obvious guise for him. He simply doesn't want to do it if its not fun for him to do (a tall order considering the topic at hand) and this story is going to be a little outside of his ordinary work. He embraces what might be considered the more cartoony side of comics (At least as far as form is concerned. His books are absolutely not for children, pregnant women or anyone with a heart condition) and his art falls somewhere in the vein of Johnny Ryan, Robert Crumb and Sergio Aragones. You'd certainly never suspect comics of this intensity and audacity to come from such a nice, usually quite private guy either. His previous publications (Sensor Trip and Office Boredom to name two. The man has a damn sizable body of work for a guy with a day job. There should be a new Sensor Trip out soon. Keep your peepers peeled) showcase this form within the context of what would either be called shock comics or wow-this-is-fucked-what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-this-guy-and-whats-wrong-with-me-for-laughing-so-hard comics. Either moniker will do.
 

It may seem odd that a man whose comics can be so gloriously crass and riddled with every possible permutation of the dick-and-fart joke, the brutally sacrilegious joke, the downright disturbing joke (can it even be called joke at that point?) can have issues with representing his father in a comic book. Nick even points out that;

You do these crazy, vulgar ass comics, but at the same time, the real horror, the real shocking stuff, the real shit, you're so timid to put in your books.

This seems to be Sergio's means of both maintaining critical distance from the heartache and anathema that life has a tendency to create and of rendering "real horror" into the absurd as a means of devaluing it in a highly entertaining way. This is really what Sergios all about; he wants to entertain himself and his readers. "I have to make it fun, even if the subject is not fun... what I'm trying to do is have someone look at a book and laugh or smile or go 'Holy shit did you see this?' I want people to enjoy what I do." Who doesn't enjoy a picture of Jesus excreting an Easter egg from his backside? I know I do.             

Nick Choban:
                  My life's breath is for the story itself. I don't mean your story, I mean THE story.

I'm fortunate to be working mostly on projects I'm proud to be a part of but it is a job so sometimes I have to figure out how to do justice to something I'm not very into. And I like that about graphic design- there are things I'm always researching and learning about. Things to be interested in if only for the duration of a job. The whole thing about book design, in particular, is that you're packaging atmosphere. You're setting the tone of the content, unconsciously preparing the reader and even accentuating the content with visual cues. So I just have to look for what that tone is and hopefully find how to do something new with it.

In stark contrast to the work of Sergio, we have Nick Choban, a story teller whose main fault is that he can't draw fast enough to put out everything that he writes. Not a bad fault to have. Whereas Sergio's comics have an incredibly vivid and pronounced, cartoony quality (which pairs wonderfully with his twisted sense of humor), Nick’s work lacks a specific style or aesthetic, ranging from stark two-tone stories to pages with so much textural crosshatching that it appears that tomenta are actually sprouting from the paper. He's currently finishing up his second self-published book of stories (I was lucky enough to see all of his completed panels and have included some in here for you folks) which is, quite honestly, leaps and bounds beyond his first book (which I also like and in which Sergio appears as a guest). Sergio often draws comics and comes up with stories later, focusing primarily on visual excitement; Nick is all about the tale.

Nick Choban:

                 What I wanna do with comics is tell good stories that have a range to them...that...I just hope that I can have some emotional resonance.

His stories certainly succeed in that respect. In his first book (Wet Gringo #0) the most moving tale, without a doubt, was written about a friend (Fraf) who had passed away. In addition to being a form of catharsis (probably one of the reasons he's so adamant about Sergio publishing the book about his father), the story also posed the problem of art-in-progress for Nick. He'd written and drawn a story and when he got to what was supposed to be the end, he realized it wasn't finished, that he "wasn't over it. There was so much more to talk about and I didn't have any idea where it was gonna go." He was forced to accept the story-in-transit, as something that, on some level, was writing itself (and writing back to him) as much as he was writing it. This in particular has had a big influence on the new work that he's producing. He told me that he realized several pages into a story set on a ship that he'd been drawing slightly crooked the whole time, as if the panels were sympathetically bobbing up and down with the ship. The artist resonates onto the page and the page resonates right back.

His new work also contains elements of reality and dream reverberating within one another, at one point even utilizing two characters in a bar to embody this very echoic discourse.

He describes it as an old man entering a bar and buying his drinks with a blood stained one hundred dollar bill and eventually entering into a discussion with the bartender, with the following being Nick's synopsis of the scene;

 

Nick Choban:

                 The old man goes into this spiel about dreams, about how dreams are completely invalid. Even if you do achieve what you thought was your dream at one point, it's actually not your dream, its just these moments in your real life that you have to deal with and you still have to kind of fancy them up to be your dream. The man is still young and he still has hope for his own dreams and for this idealistic romanticism of this own dreams.

We have the reality that gave up on the dream, the dream desperately trying to give up on the reality, and the medium through which the two communicate, a crinkled up, ulcer blood smudged Ben Franklin. Its more than just a financial signifier; its the capital both worlds share; its the glory of one and the destroyer of the other. It's gonna be a great story.

At the end of the evening, after we settled up for our trashy ball park nachos and our beer, and Nick, while within the plummy, tannic embrace of Merlot inspired courage, had finished conducting his own interview with some young ladies at the bar (which unfortunately I didn't have the space for here), I asked them to describe their differences to me, to help me define them in terms of their schools of thought and their general approach to comics. Nick tried to describe it as such. "Sergios books are more of a run up and kick you in the nuts kinda thing. I'm more about getting you to swallow the hook." The Armed Robber and the Confidence Man.

Sergio Zuniga : http://www.beernutcomics.com
Nick Choban : http://www.fishcanbreatheairtoo.com