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The Hole: Consumer Culture, an interview

posted by Matt Knicl at 10:55 pm.

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Hole In One

A few months ago, U of I scholars and employees Damian Duffy and John Jennings released an original graphic novel, The Hole: Consumer Culture, through their CU-based comic publisher Eye Trauma Comix. This local dynamic duo plans on releasing more books in the future, and working with Krannert Art Museum, organizes comic themed exhibits to increase awareness of this medium.

Damian Duffy took time to speak with me about The Hole and his love of comics.

Matt Knicl: What inspired you to get into comics?

Damian Duffy: When I was six, my dad bought me a reprint of the two part Spider-Man story where Gwen Stacy dies. A bit later that year, I got a hold of some old Amazing Spider-Man issues when John Romita Sr. was drawing them. Once I tore through that stash, I started making my own comics. Maybe I was too young to realize you can just buy more comics, I don’t know. In a more mature time, like 14-15, I really started to get a sense of how much untapped potential there was in the medium for personal expression. Understanding Comics helped that epiphany along.

Matt: What writers and artists are your influence?

Damian: In terms of comics writers, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison are probably two of my biggest influences, in that both are very conscious about doing new things with the medium, things you can’t do in any other medium. I was also influenced by Brian Michael Bendis’s pre-Marvel work, especially Jinx and Torso. And Don DeLillo is a prose novel author that’s influenced my writing quite a bit. Some of the comics artists that have influenced the way I think about visual storytelling: the aforementioned Romita, Sr., Scott McCloud, Keith Knight, Chris Ware, Peter Bagge, Dave McKean, David Mack. And what about the letterers? Can’t leave out the letterers! Letterers need lovin’ too! Artie Simek, Todd Klein, Dave Sim, and the brilliant and I think often overlooked (as a letterer) Stan Sakai. A loud shout out to one and all!

Matt: Where did the idea for Hole come from?

Damian: Well, a few places. First off, the Hole is actually sort of a remake of a character John created for his first self-published graphic novel, The Hole: Parts of a Hole. The character in that book was a white guy named Erik Spade who had a mouth in his torso. He was sort of a horror superhero, fighting the Mafia. About two years ago, John came up with the idea of re-doing the Hole as an African American character, and making the story a reaction to the shameful mishandling of Hurricane Katrina evacuation and relief efforts, as well as the dehumanizing portrayals of African Americans by mass media in the wake of the disaster. Which was a subject we were interested in tackling, but I really didn’t want to do that by doing a retread of a story that John had already done. The thing that changed my mind… In the original story, the supernatural aspects were based on Judeo-Christian belief structures. For this version, John wanted to have the guy get the scary mouth on his stomach via Voodoo. That lead me to the thought of having something called HyperVoodoo, a sort of mixture of the Hollywood version of Voodoo with crazy next generation technology. And I liked the idea of comparing the fictionalized version of Voodoo with the real life religion. Also, in his original conception of the character, John called the Hole “the ultimate consumer,” and thought about him as sort of a satire of American consumer culture. I always felt like that never came across in the original incarnation, which was pretty much a straight forward action-adventure story. So bringing out that satirical aspect of the character was very appealing to me. Like John, I’m really interested in talking about the way media sells society to itself, how we define our culture by the things we buy, and how that’s scary. Which, by the way, is the reason The Hole: Consumer Culture is a horror story.

Matt: What did you do to prepare to create this project?

Damian: A good ten months of research between the two of us, reading over critical analyses of capitalism, mass media, representations of race, histories of Voodoo, studies of American representations of Voodoo in popular culture, lots of heady kind of academic stuff. One of our goals for the book is to make it a talking point, a text to inspire people to think about and discuss things like race, gender, and culture in thoughtful and complex ways, so we really needed to have that foundation of research to channel into the book. The other thing we did was travel and speak at various academic conferences about comics, popular culture, and African-American studies. Oftentimes we were there talking about the research we were doing for The Hole: Consumer Culture. The feedback and suggestions we got from people we met at these events was invaluable. And through that entire ten months, before I set down the first word of the script, we talked over plot points and story ideas that we thought were important to the story.

Matt: Is this the first title in a series?

Damian: Sort of. The Hole: Consumer Culture is a graphic novel in two parts. What’s just come out is Vol. 1: “Open.” Vol. 2 will be called “Close,” and will hopefully come out next year.

Matt: For you, what are comics?

Damian: Comics is a medium, a way to express information, narrative, emotional, factual, visual, textual, whatever. I’m a firm believer that you can communicate almost anything with comics, not just warnings of the ever-present threat of Skrulls. The thing I’ll probably be spending the next few years looking into (I just got into the PhD program at the UIUC Graduate School of Library and Information Science) is how comics can work as an educational resource, particularly an online educational resource. Because we must use the internet to protect ourselves from Skrull plots. They’re trying to steal our precious bodily fluids, you know. You ever see a Skrull drink a glass of water?

Matt: Why did you choose to have Voodoo as the focus of Hole?

Damian: The original impetus was the fact that a number of the people displaced by Katrina are Voodoo practitioners. But the major reason is, Voodoo is a potent metaphor for the way media represents race. Voodoo in the movies is all scary witchdoctors killing people with dolls that look like them, worshiping demons, chopping off heads. In real life, Vodou practitioners dance and pray. Animals sacrificed to the spirits (called loa or lwa) are usually then eaten at a feast. So, y’know, this devil worship is really people in an agrarian community cooking a holiday dinner. But they’re Black people, and Haiti (where Vodou originated in the Western Hemisphere) was the first Black run nation in the New World, a nation that grew out of a slave revolt no less. So the imperialists, the slave owners of the time, it’s in there best interests to paint these people as savage, not spiritual. And that portrayal gets carried down through popular culture. The story of Voodoo in Western culture is a nice little microcosm of the process by which social and political propaganda sneaks its way into our entertainment. That process is a major focus of the graphic novel.

Matt: Are there any other projects you have in the works through Eye Trauma?

Damian: Yes indeed. Aside from the second volume of The Hole, John and I are co-curating a comics art show called Out of Sequence for the Krannert Art Museum. John and I are also co-editing a collection of scholarly essays with Professor Frances Gateward called Sweet Christmas! Constructions of Blackness in Comics and Sequential Art. And we’re working with another professor, Chris Benson, on adapting one of his short stories into a comic. I’m also working on The Deadly Mansion of Doom, a comic strip I write and letter and Dann Tincher draws for F Magazine, the newspaper of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Dann attends. In fact, we’re so busy we haven’t had a chance to update our website!

Matt: Can you explain the exhibits you are arranging?

Damian: Well, John and I curated a show at Jackson State University last year called Other Heroes: African-American comics creators, characters and archetypes, which was pretty successful. The catalog is still for sale online, and all proceeds go to Scholarship America for the
non-profit’s disaster relief fund, which helps Gulf Coast students displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita get money for college. That was sort of a warm up for Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics, which opens at the Krannert Art Museum on October 23, 2008 and runs until early January 2009. We’re using the term “Underrepresented” in a very broad sense to mean any sort of comic that isn’t often considered by the mainstream public. Which means: Comics by women artists, minority artists, gay and lesbian artists, independent comics, mini-comics, gallery comics, abstract comics, webcomics, virtual reality comics, and more. There’s more info on KAM’s site: http://www.kam.uiuc.edu/pr/outofsequence/, and we’ll be spreading the word in the Fall semester.

images courtesy Eye Trauma

Matt Knicl: My name is Matt Knicl. I'm a U of I alumn and one of those unemployed English majors Garrison Keillor likes to make fun of. I've been reading comics since high school and one day I would like to write them. My goal is to expose readers to what is out there in the world of comics and using my English powers, show what is worth reading or not. I can be reached at buzz.comics@gmail.com.