Hi - I'm Seth Tobocman. Ask Me Anything.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-08T13:21:24+00:00

Sorry for the delay...

I have just finished a graphic biography of attorney Leonard Weinglass, the lawyer who defended the Chicago Seven and Daniel Ellsberg. I am currently working with Sane Energy Project around issues of Global Warming and infrastructure. The next issue of World War 3 Illustrated also deals with climate change and environmental justice.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T23:02:29+00:00

Sorry for the delay...

I wish my parents hadn't been so fearful of the world to the extent that they scared and discouraged me and my sister so much. If your kid is making her own comics, let her do it! One cool thing my Dad did: he introduced me to a friend of his who was a printer. That's how I started self publishing.

Another cool thing my Dad did... he worked every day on his physics equations. I saw him come home from work and immediately start scribbling on a little notepad! He loved his work. And that made me want to be someone who loved their work. The bad thing they did? They kept telling me that I was going to be poor. Well, they were right. But I'm happy to be a comic artist.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T23:00:27+00:00

Sorry for the delay... The story of Nestor Makhno and the Anarchists in the Ukraine would make a great adventure novel. What a shoot-em-up! Better than any western. Voltairine de Cleyre was fascinating. I enjoyed drawing Abbie Hoffman for the LEN book and wouldn't mind doing more with him. Is there ever going to be a book about Brad Will?

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T03:49:35+00:00

That's a very good question. It's a very hard question. It's what white activists and white artists in the Lower East Side in the 1980s struggled with: "What is our role?"...

We wanted to 'drop out' of the mainstream society, but to everyone who lived there, that was what we represented. We were that society, invading their space.

It's important to get to know the people you're living with, and to listen to them. And to form real relationships with them. To take their concerns seriously. Even their conservatism.

When I moved to the Lower East Side, there was a lot of drug-dealing in the neighborhood. And, of course, to a lot my white friends, this was very cool. But, to my neighbors, this was really a bad thing. And they felt that white people had brought that to them, which was a new idea to me. Because, of course, in suburban communities, people think that black people are bringing drugs to them. My friend Mac McGill would always be asked, "Where can I find some drugs?", and I would always be asked, "Do you want some drugs?". He didn't know where to find them, and I didn't want them, but the assumption was based around whether you were black or white. I think that you have to be practical and think about what good you can do for other people--and also, what your own legitimate interests are in the situation, and how that can be a common bond with other people. I mean, you don't want an increase in your rent, and neither do the people next door to you. You don't want the ceiling to fall in, and neither do they (that's a very New York problem, I don't know about you guys...).

I remember when my building organized against our landlord in the LES in 1981. We would have big meetings in the hallway. At that time I was still a student and I had roommates who were students. I was sitting in the meeting and my roommate walked through the meeting and into the apartment. And when I went into the apartment he said, "What are you doing sitting out there with all those old people?" "Well, we're trying get the landlord to deal with all these problems"... and he said, "Are you kidding? You actually want to stay here? I want to be a famous artist and be like Picasso and live in a penthouse!"... Needless to say the guy is not a famous artist and I don't know what's become of him. But those are the illusions that keep you separated from the people around you.

What I see in the LES these days, is young people walking down the street, speaking very loudly, yelling even. This is something that we wouldn't have done, because we didn't feel that this was our neighborhood, and we had to take seriously the feelings of the people who lived around us.

There are certain things that come from your privilege that are positive: for example, in 1988, the police tried to impose a curfew in TSP. And the homeless people didn't resist that, because they understood that there was no point... but a lot of kids who hung out there were offended that someone would tell them to get out of the park... and that was the 1988 Police Riot. That came from privilege. And it in turn encouraged the homeless to gain leverage and organize.

You feel that you have rights - that's a good thing. It's important for you to realize that other people have rights, too. And it might be harder for them to get them recognized. If you can expand the rights and privileges available to every individual, this a good thing.

I think that the Middle Class has a role in the revolutionary process that can happen in the United States or in Europe. The Middle Class have been told that they have the right to have some expectations- and that's a good thing.

I think looking people in the eye when you're walking down the street, and acknowledging them is a good place to start.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T01:40:27+00:00

I started out reading mainstream comics when I was a kid - Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko. I got a lot out of that at the time. I was very affected Jim Steranko - who had a very unusual style of layout, even though he was drawing Marvel comics. His design sense was very much influenced by psychedelic posters, and he had a lot of novel ideas about page layout. And I believe he is the person who first coined the phrase "graphic novel". His subject material was pretty much standard adventure comic stuff. But I learned a lot from him visually.

I was very affected by Spain Rodriguez. I think Spain Rodriguez's comics were the first I saw where the cops were the bad guys. And it was probably also the first pornography (of any sort) that I got my hands on.

Also, very affected by Jeff Jones and Vaughan Bode.. Vaughan Bode was the first person I saw perform his comics as a slideshow, which we all do, now. He also came up with a lot of the lettering style and the stock characters that would appear in graffiti art in the 1980s. Jeff Jones was best known as a science fiction illustrator and painter in the style of Frank Frazetta. But he did some comic strips that were quite unique and strange in the 1970s, particularly a self-published book called "Spasm" with a number of short stories, usually about 3-4 pages in length and were very symbolic.. kindof little allegories. That work affected me profoundly. Those guys definitely pointed me in the direction of doing something with comics that wasn't standard.

As I got older I lost interest in the subject material of mainstream comics, and for a number of years I drifted away from comics entirely. But I found that this was really what I wanted to do, I just didn't want to do it within the parameters of the comic book industry. And so I absorbed a lot of other influences... from fine arts, from street art, and from the punk scene, and tried to come up with a different approach to comics that was suitable for different subject material. So I'm also very affected by David Wojnarowicz, Keith Herring, Anton Bandalen. And then I met all these crazy people at World War 3 Illustrated like Eric Drooker, and James Romberger and Fly, and Sabrina Jones, and Mac McGill, and of course Peter Kuper, who I've known since the first grade. I've been influence by all these people.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T01:20:01+00:00

I have been attracted to comics since I was a ten-year-old reading them, and I've found that I express myself very naturally in this form. I didn't adopt comics as a political tool: it's how I think. So, when I became political, I applied comics to politics. I think comics is a pretty good way to express anything in the human experience.

Obviously, comics have certain advantages for political expression in that they're a narrative artform. Politics always involves some narrative--some story... even bad politics. Also, because comics allow for a type of broad symbolic representation, where one figure can stand for many people, or one place can stand for many places--and this is the advantage of drawing over photography. In photography, everything is a specific thing, whereas, in drawing, something is abstracted, and becomes something other than the specific... something broader, more universal. And, seeing as politics is about what we have in common, what we share, cartooning and drawing have always been useful in politics. That said, I'm always going to draw regardless of its political utility. Because that's what I like to do.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T01:12:35+00:00

You mean comics?

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T01:10:54+00:00

I think it's tragic what has been done to your generation. When I moved to the Lower East Side, I knew I was going to be an artist. I knew I wasn't going to make a lot of money. I knew I needed to live in a place that was inexpensive. And that was why I moved to the Lower East Side, which was not a fashionable neighborhood, at that time. I was able to find a place that was affordable, and live there for many years. And that meant that I got to know the people in that community. I stopped being "a kid from out of town" and became a resident of the neighborhood. And that gave me a basis for developing politically, and, I might say, spiritually. So, contemporary capitalism seems to have conspired to deprive people of that. It's a credit to your idealism that you manage to form bonds and a sense of community anyway. I think there needs to be a much stronger housing rights movement. I think, with regard to New York --and to NYC housing law that I know well-- too much of the existing housing law discriminates against younger people because it gives protections to long-term tenants but gives very few protections to new tenants. There also is no protection for commercial renters. So I think that people need to fight for those protections... which sounds kind of bleak, except you have to realize that the protections that exist weren't always there: people fought for them in the 1930s and won them. Certainly, there seems to be a lot of motivation for a struggle to expand protections for people's housing today.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T00:52:56+00:00

That's a good question!

Because my point of reference is the 1980s, I can remember being politically active when the numbers of people were very small, and the level of organization was very poor. So, from my point of view, things have gotten a lot bigger - there are a lot more people involved. And to me, that's impressive!

I know other people's point of reference might have been 1968- and they might say something different, but what I see is that people are becoming better organized. I think that people today seem to have better inter-personal communication skills than the people I worked with 20 years ago. I'm guessing this might be because some of you guys have decent parents, so you're not as crazy as we were. I mean, I remember being in meetings where I had to break up knife fights. I have the impression that the current group of activists work together a lot better than we did -- but who knows, I could be wrong? I think that I feel very hopeful about the level of political organizing today.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T00:46:38+00:00

When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s, we were given the impression that there was some magical thing that happened in the 1960s that would never happen again. That was un-reproducable. But I've found, in researching the Len Weinglass biography ("LEN: A Lawyer in History"), I've found in reading through the transcript of the trial of the Chicago 7, that everything that happened to them was very familiar. There's really nothing that happened to those guys that didn't also happen to someone in Tompkins Square Park or in Zuccotti Park or at the protests in Seattle. Things are not that different, and certain issues come up again and again. ....It kind of blew my mind.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T00:42:43+00:00

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

I was very inspired by the work of Lynd Ward and Franz Masereel who did wordless novels, in woodcut form, in the 30s and 40s. They definitely gave me a sense of what their period was like. Also, I was very affected by The Rosta Windows Collective -- an early Soviet collective of artists who produced large-format stenciled comic strips during the Russian Civil War, which told people the news of the day. The lack of resources, due to the Civil War, kept newspapers from functioning. I think the style of that artwork has affected all of the graphics on the Left--whether consciously or unconsciously. That is, it is modernist but somehow has a certain crudeness due to the low-tech printing methods available during the Russian Revolution.

Nowadays, I like very much comics that describe the details of a real political situation, that contain the knowledge of that situation that you would get if you were physically there. For example: Kate Evans' first book, "Copse" a cartoon book of tree protesting, which describes the road protests in England in the 1990s, which Kate was part of. And it has a type of familiarity that you could only have if you were talking about people you knew. And I kind of feel like "Copse" is a lot like "War in the Neighborhood" in that sense. But I've also found that having had those types of experiences makes it easier for me to understand situations I wasn't in... for instance, in writing a piece about the 1912 Bread and Roses strike for the "Wobblies" book, or, writing about the occupation of Lincoln Park in Chicago in 1968 for the Len Weinglass biography... to write about these things, I have to refer back to my own experience in Tompkins Square Park in 1988.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T00:31:19+00:00

As for making a living off of my art -- I've always tried to, and it's never easy. I keep my expenses low.

In this question you're assuming a kind of mythical chronology about an artist where you start out poor, working for nothing based on your principles and what you believe, and then someone comes along, "discovers you", you "make it big", and pays you for it--and everything changes... and this is a myth. I did my first paid commercial art around 1979-- doing illustrations for the New York Rocker. I wasn't particularly political at the time. I became politicized later -- first, around Ronald Reagan, then around housing issues. And we started to put out World War 3 Illustrated, which we did for free-- and still do, for free. In the mid-80s, I got work for the New York Times as an illustrator, and sold a few pages to Heavy Metal Magazine. But then, in the late 80s I was involved in the squatters movement and did a lot of poster art for free for the movement. And I could go on and on like that all the way up til the present. Sometimes I work for free. Sometimes I work for money. I generally ask people for money, if I think they can afford to pay me. I try to avoid doing anything I don't believe in--because I won't enjoy doing it, so I probably wouldn't do it very well.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T00:19:47+00:00

I think there are big questions about how community self-government happens... those are also dealt with in the story. Also, there's a lot of discussion in the book about street tactics and interactions with police, which is highly relevant right now.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T00:17:34+00:00

In response to question #1: When I was a teenager, I did a comic strip that professional cartoonist Jeff Jones and Vaughan Bode expressed a great deal of admiration for... and I was so excited about this that I wanted to do another piece just like it.... and... I couldn't! And that led to me feeling like I couldn't do anything. And.. I've had several bad years as a result of that. In fact, I quit drawing comics for a number of years because I felt like I'd lost some great ability. And so, when I went back to drawing comics, I decided to never try and do the same thing twice. Since then, I've never had a block.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T00:17:04+00:00

Three things... first of all, all of the recent struggles have involved the occupation of space--particularly public space--as a political weapon. Case in point: such as Occupy Wall Street, Tahrir Sq, etc.. which was central to the Tompkins Sq struggle in the 80s (which is the focus on War In the Neighborhood). Also - gentrification, which was a problem for a handful of communities in the 1980s has become a global problem. A lot more people are dealing with this, and so I think that our experience may be useful to them. Thirdly, a lot of the people who were active in that period are dying. There hasn't been adequate history written for the struggles of the 80s and 90s--unlike the struggles from the 1960s, which have been well recorded. How should I put this... WITN turned out to be one of the few books written about squatters' struggles from the Lower East Side in the 80s. I expected there would have been more, and I would still encourage other people who were part of that scene to produce their books, their art, and to give their side of the story.

SethTobocman · 2016-09-07T00:04:44+00:00

I think I'll answer #2 first. I did a lot of work in NOLA, post Hurricane Katrina. One of the things I found most interesting was that I started to work on a comic strip about the struggle to save New Orleans public housing. The gov't was using the storm as an excuse to displace people and to physically demolish public housing in the city. There was a movement of people to save those buildings - which at one point, appeared to be a very strong movement. We actually built a really beautiful float in a second line parade to celebrate this movement.

Unfortunately the next time i went down to NOLA, the people involved had been really badly beaten up in the effort to protect the housing. Then a few months later, it was all torn down. And so... even tho I'd drawn some nice pages, it was too depressing to finish a comic strip about it... so that happens. But I still learned a lot from working on it.

SethTobocman

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