Weird Addiction: Farel Dalrymple on Pop Gun War, Emotion, and Obsession

Dalrymple’s scratchy pen-and-ink style (with some color added in the new addition) is somehow hyperreal in its depiction of race, class, and eccentric humanity. The whole thing defies description, but the blurb isn’t really the point: it’s a sympathetic, dreamlike trip into the heart of a city, witnessesd through the eyes of a child. Dalrymple himself is taking a bit of a break from the big city, working on the second volume from one of his childhood stomps, Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s a far cry from New York, and, for an artist with a smart, emotional eye for place and time, it’s likely to have an influence on works yet to come. I caught up with him there to talk about the old book and the new, as well as art, fantasy, emotion, and selling a book that’s impossible to describe.
So, this volume coming out is a reprint of the book you did in 2003?
That’s right. I originally did them as individual issues. Self-published. I got a Xeric (Foundation) grant for the first issue, then this very independent company helped me put out the four subsequent issues. Someone passed her along the comics to Dark Horse and then contacted me about doing a collection. It was reprinted once, and then just went out of print. I’m doing the sequel to Pop Gun War with Image’s Island imprint, so it just seemed like a good fit to do the reprint. It’s a little bigger, has some color images, and eight extra pages that were in the original issues that weren’t in the actual trade.
That was one of your first books?
Yeah, I did a forty-page floppy comic that I self-published around 1999, and some work-for-hire stuff. But that was the first thing that was my own.
So what was it like returning to that? How did you feel coming back to the story?
I feel pretty good about it. I did it a long time ago, so there’s a couple of things…it was my younger self, so I cringe a little bit, but I’m proud of the thing as a whole. I worked really hard on it when I put it out the first time…it’s not something I just hacked out. It’s exciting for me that it’s being reprinted. The first twenty-something pages of he sequel that I’ve been working on…I drew those over ten years ago. I was just coloring them recently. That felt a little weird: just kinda coloring over stuff that I’d done a long time ago. I still really like the art and the story. It’s personal stuff to me. Doing The Wrenchies and doing Palefire, both of those were a completely different process from each other, and also from the Pop Gun War stuff. Brandon Graham, who does books called King City and Multiple Warheads, he brought me onboard doing stuff for the Island imprint, and I was like: “Hey, I wanna do this sequel for Pop Gun War,” and he was like: “Do you wanna do the reprint as well?” It seemed like good timing for them to both come out. This year the reprint of the first volume’s coming out,  and hopefully next year around this time I’ll have volume two.
I’m curious about how you describe Pop Gun War. What’s your elevator pitch for the book? It’s a little tricky to describe in a blurb.
I feel, in a way, like it’s a hard sell for people. There’s so much emphasis on graphic novels or comic books to be turned into other forms of media, like television or movies or video games. I kinda balk at that a little bit, because I don’t think about that kind of thing while I’m working on whatever project I’m working on. With this book in particular, I just give the most literal description I can think of: it’s the story of this young boy who lives in a city, kind of a magical city, who finds a pair of wings, and he puts them on his back and flies around and gets in adventures with different  strange people and interesting friends and family. There’re some supernatural elements to it, too. It’s not as overt as something like The Wrenchies. It’s a little more subtle. I’ve heard people describe it as “Magical realism.” I dunno. I’m terrible at writing prose, and I feel like my strength is using pictures and words together to tell a story. So I just say it’s the story of a boy who has adventures in a magical-type city.
Which is what it’s about…but it’s clearly not what it’s really about.
Yeah, It’s kind of about the emotion. All my stories, I mine stuff from when I was a child. Whether the comics are intended for adults or children or whatever. It’s just a place my brain goes to. I like relaying this sort of nostalgic-y emotion or feeling you get. The way memory is sort of nebulous, or feels like dreams. I like that stuff, and I like to read and watch that sorta thing.
You’re from Oklahoma, yeah?
I grew up here. I’m originally from California. I only lived there until I was 5, and then we moved out to Tulsa because my mom wanted to work for a minister that was out here. So I was raised super-religious, and then we moved back to California for a few years when I was a teenager, and then I moved back to Tulsa in my early 20s. And then I moved to New York, and I left all the religious stuff when I got there. Wasn’t for me. I lived in Oregon for the past eight years, and now I’m up for anything. Maybe I’ll move back there, I don’t know. I don’t really want to live in a city. Portland was nice because there’s so much art-centric stuff. A good music scene. But I’m really into being isolated and alone, and a more urban environment isn’t really conducive to that.
Luckily, you’re in a field where you can live wherever you want, I’d assume. The reason I ask about that is that you’re this kid from Oklahoma—and the book is this very European, dreamlike story. The book deals with labels, so it’s not really fair of me to hone in on the Oklahoma thing, but I was curious about the influences that brought you to those sensibilities.
I think you’re spot-on sensing the European influence. I moved from religious Oklahoma to hedonist New York City, and I went to School of Visual Arts. When I got there, I drew comics, but I didn’t read a lot of comics. I felt maybe slightly too old for it—loved the superhero thing growing up, but I wanted something different. I needed something a little more sophisticated than just capes or machine guns, which was all I was into growing up. When i got to New York, I started reading all this stuff from the school library and going to comic shops and finding Paul Pope and Jeff Smith, and I remember reading Violent Cases from Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman. There are a bunch of other ones, but, more than anything, living in New York was my biggest influence on Pop Gun War. I’d never lived anywhere like that before. It’s a really big city! I spent a lot of time just looking up to the tops of buildings.

While I was in school, I’d sit in on any class I could. I took one semester of a drawing class called “Drawing on Location”. That was very liberating to me. I feel like one of the strengths of Pop Gun War is the backgrounds, more than even the characters. Growing up, I learned perspective from “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.” You know, the one and two-point perspective? But when I took that class, my teacher told me to not be so fussy about it, and to focus on the way things feel. Every class that I took, every painting that I made…it was all to fuel my comics. And I noticed that a lot of traditional American comics follow a similar formula: you have to rule all the perspective lines out. A lot of artists I knew were like “I hate drawing backgrounds, backgrounds are so annoying.” I decided to learn how to really love drawing backgrounds, so I would just go out on the street and just draw backgrounds and people interacting with environments. Stuff like that. that was the biggest learning thing I could do: drawing all the time, and drawing from life. I definitely looked at a lot of European books: Mœbius, or Sergio Toppi, dudes like that. But I feel like it was more like me sitting down and wanting to approach things in a different way then how I see everyone else doing it, and trying to infuse real life. Even though I’m dealing with fantasy, I want it to be grounded in some kind of reality. Even making the main character African-American: I thought, why aren’t there African-Americans in any of these comics that I’m seeing in the store?
That’s interesting, because one of the things I really liked about the book was that sense that it’s fantasy, but it feels like New York City. A weird fantasy version, but still…
One of the buildings in there I just copied: the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg. I’d ride my bike by it, and it smelled horrible. But it was the coolest, weirdest looking building. I would go on these photo safaris around town and take tons of pictures of things that I liked, so now I have this catalog of things I can go to whenever I want.
You’re doing pretty much everything yourself for these books?
I’ve worked with a bunch of different writers over the years, but I definitely prefer doing everything myself. Just because I’m a control freak. I like the idea of collaboration, but I’m not very good at motivating myself to fulfill other people’s visions. With my own stuff, it’s fun: I know what I want to draw, and I don’t have to stress out making sure that the information is relayed precisely the way the writer wanted it. Or, you get something back from the colorist and it’s not how you imagined it.
It sounds exhausting.
It can be at times! I’m just obsessive. I ask myself why I do comics a lot, and it’s just kinda this weird addiction that I have. I have to do it, and have to do it myself.

I’m always curious about process, especially with visual arts: when you put something together, is it an organic process for you? Or are there discrete steps for all of the different roles?
It’s pretty compartmentalized, though I change up my process from book to book. With the Pop Gun War stuff I’m working on now, I actually have a script that I wrote around the time the first trade paperback came out. With The Wrenchies, I had a three-page plot written out, and a bunch of art, notes, drawings, and things like that. I would thumbnail 30 pages, but I had a beginning, middle, and end planned out. When I start actually drawing, I’ll pencil ten or twenty pages first. Then I’ll go back and ink all of them. Then go back and color them. Then scan them. I mix it all up a bit. But then I did a webcomic called It Will All Hurt…and that was just stream-of-consciousness, one panel at a time.
It sounds like you’re not going to be bored anytime soon.
I feel like I’m just constantly fighting against being bored. I need that to make the work exciting to me, and to other people. I have to mix up my process from project to project.
Pop Gun War, Volume 1: Gift is available May 17.