How Kevin Smith traded on his filmmaking for a side-job in the funny papers.

“How did you break into comics?” a voice shouts across a San Francisco convention meeting room. Filmmaker Kevin Smith, presiding over the crowd of comic fanboys, grows a sly grin. Then a bulge protrudes from the side of his mouth as his tongue pushes against the inside of his cheek, he raises his clenched fist up to his mouth, and slides it back and forth in the universally recognized fellatio pantomime. Laughter bursts forth from the crowd.

Of course, Smith was joking about giving head to comic book publishers. In actuality, the screenwriter/director/actor’s road to writing comic books hasn’t been that easy: he had to make three movies (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy)- filling two of them with plenty of comic book in-jokes (not to mention a cameo by comics legend Stan Lee)- before anyone noticed that he really wanted to write comics.

“I’m one of those guys who goes the long way around to get to a very short goal,” Kevin said in a 1997 interview with this writer. “If there’s one thing that I hope this film career does for me, it is help get my foot in the door of comics so I can write some scripts for comics.”

By late ’97 Smith’s ploy had worked, and in January ’98 a Jay & Silent Bob (the dope-smoking duo from his films) story appeared in the acclaimed comic Oni Double Feature.

Since then, Oni Press has published two Clerks one-shots, a four-issue Jay & Silent Bob mini-series, and a Bluntman & Chronic (characters who first appeared in mock comic book form in Chasing Amy) story. Smith also just wrapped up an eight-month tenure writing Daredevil for Marvel Comics. And, showing his full support for the medium, the filmmaker actually bought his local comic book store in Red Bank, New Jersey rather than see it go out of business. Though he admits he hasn’t juggled the comics with writing, directing, and editing his upcoming film Dogma very well (“I’ve got to answer to the other job”), Smith’s books have found acceptance, selling briskly at shops and conventions across the country. He even earned the 1999 Harvey Award (comic-dom’s version of the Oscar and Golden Globe rolled into one) for Best New Talent. Aside from ultra-brief cameos from artists Mike Allred (Bluntman & Chronic) and Jim Mahfood (Clerks), Dogma doesn’t feature the same litany of comics references as its predecessors. “In this flick there was no room for it,” Smith explains. “I didn’t feel too bad because the movie itself is kind of like a comic book.” Indeed, there are tentative plans to release a comic book called Bartelby & Loki (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Dogma characters) which, according to Smith, will “kind of tell their story from before the movie, from the dawn of creation all the way up to the flick.”- Spence Abbott