- Kevin Smith, director of “Clerks,” “Mallrats, ” and “Chasing Amy,” is a notorious workaholic. When I contacted his production company, View Askew, to ask if he was available to sit down with me to talk about his extensive work in comic books — not only is he working on titles for DC and Marvel, he also has his own titles for Oni Press, most recently a “Jay and Silent Bob” mini-series, the second of which is slated to be available to coincide with the release of “Dogma,” his fourth feature film — I was told he was tied up in globe-trotting post production on the film. However, where there is a will, there is a way. While Smith was willing to grant me a brief phone interview, I thought it might be more advantageous to utilize another passion the two of us have in common — e-mail. After all, that is how the British Monarchy have taken to answering questions, and Smith is the crown prince of Indies — the star in the Miramax crown. While I have a feeling he was typing on a laptop while simultaneously hunching over an edit bay, checking sound loops on his ‘flick,’ as he refers to his films, I prefer to romanticize it a little. He’s sitting in his bedroom, in a pair of footie pj’s (hey, it’s MY fantasy, damn it!), surrounded by half-finished comic art and scrawled-in spiral notebooks, a cigarette dripping from his mouth, a cold cup of coffee next to him, typing away on his laptop, and every once in a while, he’s smiling (it makes his eyes crinkle in a very appealing way.) And I am in my apartment, in a red satin teddy, a lipstick print on the cup of cold coffee next to me, smiling and typing right back. That’s as much as I’m going to tell you… except I hope it was as good for him as it was for me.
NY Press : The great thing about the Jay and Silent Bob books is that it’s moved you away from the label “vanity press,” and the common belief held by non-comic lovers that all you were doing was illustrating scripts of your movies. They really do stand on their own as independent stories, while maintaining that prevalent point of view you infuse your other projects with. Which came first, the desire to create comics or films?
Kevin Smith : It depends which comics you mean.
Long before I wanted to be a filmmaker, I wanted to write comics in the vein of Alan Moore and Frank Miller — the first authors I’d read after dropping out of the comics scene during those too-cool-for-that-shit high school years. I was blown away by their stuff, and figured that if ‘Dark Knight’ and ‘Watchmen’ were what comics were today, then I wanted to be a comic book writer.
It was, however, a field that didn’t seem like there was much access to — a very incestuous field, almost. Very few new writers ever popped up, and when they did, they were someone like Neil Gaiman — someone who made it seem that much more daunting by virtue of the fact that they were so fucking brilliant, and writing incredibly original stuff.
Film, in comparison, seemed far more accessible to me. In the end, I think I just took a roundabout way of getting into comics.
NY Press : Do you draw at all? Do you storyboard together with the artist, or do you give your stuff over to that artist’s interpretation? As a writer/director, it’s clearly your vision — how does it feel to be under an editor as opposed to being in control?
Kevin Smith : I couldn’t draw with a gun to my head. I’m a terrible artist (in ALL media, my detractors would suggest). Based on that, I’ve had to be a thousand times more descriptive and detailed in the comic strips, whereas in the screenplays to the flicks I’m going to direct I can be as fast and loose with the descriptive passages because I know what I want to see and will make sure I see it when we shoot — I’m not the one visualizing the comic script. I have to detail anything I want to see in each panel on every page. So, comparatively, the comic scripts end up being longer on a per-page basis than the screenplays.
In terms of having an editor, Schreck and Joe (my publishers/editors) have been about as liberal as folks who hold the title can be. They’ve never restricted me, always have been supportive, and offered only the most technical of editorial notes (for example — how to figure out whether or not you can stick a splash page anywhere you want to). I’m fairly decent with spelling and my grammar, so they rarely have to worry about that. And it’s not like they have to play “continuity cops” on the scripts; the only continuity I have to be mindful of are the films, really, and who knows those better than me?
But having an editor for ‘Daredevil’ — that’s a different story. There’s decades worth of history on that character, as well as a comics code to contend with. It’s notes-city with that title.
NY Press : Ok, I can see that you feel you need the strong visual element to tell your stories — that’s why comic books (and movies) and not novels… I can see that it’s easy to translate your work into comics, similar scripting and all. But will there be a graphic novel, something longer, deeper, and meaty for fans of both your prose and visual sensibilities?
Kevin Smith : Do I even have visual sensibilities? I never think of myself as being visual — something I’ve always marked as ironic, being that I work in a visual medium (now two).
I don’t know if there’s a graphic novel somewhere down the road, but I can say that the writing I’m doing on ‘Daredevil” at Marvel and plan to do on ‘Green Arrow’ over at DC is leaps and bounds away from what I call the ‘Askewniverse’ stuff — the titles that stem from the flicks. The DD and GA stuff is more along the lines of what I’ve always wanted to do — tell literate, haunting stories like Moore, Miller, Gaiman, Grant Morrison, John Ostrander, Matt Wagner, Mark Millar, etc. When Joe Quesada first gave my DD pages a look, he said, “I don’t want this to come off as [sounding] bad, but it’s not ‘you’, it’s not what I expected. It’s hard core, classical comic book storytelling.” That made my year.
NY Press : Why Oni as your publishing company? I mean, it’s hard to see a commitment to a singular vision there. Is that the point? Is this so your work doesn’t get tarted up by marketing it through Dark Horse or lost in the infamous Fantagraphics-Dennis Kitchen “have another bong hit, great comic, man, so, we’ll shoot for say, next year to release it” shuffle?
Kevin Smith : We’re with Oni for two reasons — a) Bob Schreck, and b) they asked.
It’s true — no one else was knocking on our door. In fact, we’d tried to set up house a few times before, to no avail.
After we’d shot “Chasing Amy,” we met Schreck in Atlanta at the DragonCon. He was with Dark Horse at the time, and Scott Mosier (my producer) and I had this idea that we could maybe do a ‘Bluntman and Chronic’ title to coincide with the release of the flick. It made sense, here’s a movie set in the comic book industry, featuring a title drawn by the main characters. Schreck thought it was a no-brainer, so he went back to Mike Richardson (editor in chief at the Horse) and pitched it. Richardson said, “Nah.” That was that.
The frustration over that — and for many other reasons– prompted Bob to quit the Horse. So a few months after he quit, Schreck called me and Mosier and announced he’d decided to go into publishing. After all his years toiling at places like Comico, Marvel, and Dark Horse, he’d worked with almost anyone on the talent side you could think of, so it was going to be no problem getting good material to put out there. He wanted to know if we still felt like doing any comics stuff.
At that point, Mosier and I had been entertaining notions of self-publishing a ‘Jay and Silent Bob’ book anyway, so joining forces with Bob seemed like a good move — he knew the business, and was the only guy (outside of Quesada and Palmiotti) who ever said to himself, “Duh! Those guys like comics, AND they have a built-in audience!”
Kudos to the man who uses his noggin and works on a hunch, I say. That’s the guy I hitch my wagon to.
NY Press : The Oni imprint says it’s dedicated to some sort of quality, and they certainly have signed up all kinds of big names to do bit work, but by diversifying your artists and editors, aren’t you afraid that your vision will be diluted?
Kevin Smith : Again, I don’t know that I necessarily have a ‘vision.’ I just want to tell these stories that wouldn’t be strong enough to carry their own feature, but work like gang-busters on the paneled page.
The nice thing about the three artists I’ve worked with on the Oni stuff is that they’ve had three completely different sensibilities, all of which have blended nicely with the particular stories they’ve drawn. As much as I love what Jim Mahfood did with the ‘Clerks’ comic, I don’t think his style would’ve suited the ‘Jay and Silent Bob’ mini-series. And as gorgeous as Duncan’s stuff is on the ‘Jay and Silent Bob’ mini-series, it wouldn’t have fit the surrealistic story of the ‘Clerks’ comic. And Matt’s take on Jay and Bob was the only one that could’ve possibly made the transition to action figures. I’m happy that each book has had a different artist; it’s given each book its own distinct look.
NY Press : Duncan Fegredo is the illustrator of the new Jay and Silent Bob comic. Why, and how, did you work with Duncan? After all, the illustrated cover (as opposed to the photo cover also available, featuring both yourself and Jason Mewes as the title characters) was done by Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti…
Kevin Smith : There was a project Duncan was working on that got pulled out from under him rather unfairly. It left a huge window open for him to do some work. He was telling Schreck about his misfortune, and Schreck was looking for an artist for the mini at that point. He asked Duncan if he’d like to give it a shot, then asked me what I thought of Duncan. I’d loved Duncan’s work on DC’s ‘Enigma’ years before, so I jumped at the chance to work with him. I was a little worried at first that his ultra-realistic style might not blend with the slightly – heightened tone of the series, but Duncan’s delivered in spades. He’s stretching with this book, if you can believe that. I think it’s his first “humorous” work.
Joe and Jimmy were kind enough to provide the cover for the first issue, Mike Allred did the cover to issue #2, and Duncan’s doing the covers to #3 and #4.
NY Press : You’re not the first director to make the crossover to comics, obviously. What did you think of the Spike Lee comics? I saw him more of a producer than a creator, myself — not a writer/editor/artist, but someone more committed to creating an independent (politicized) vision than to creating the kind of quality that comic audiences expect.
Kevin Smith : I had no idea Spike dabbled in comics.
NY Press : Do you identify with Glenn Danzig and his Verotic press? He’s certainly creating comics he’d like to buy, the whole sex, violence, fantasy, teenage geek heaven trip.
Kevin Smith : While I haven’t liked everything they’ve put out, I do respect the fact that Danzig’s doing precisely the kinds of titles he’d like to buy. He saw a void out there and filled it. Good for him.
NY Press : You know, the more I read about you, the more I’m reminded of Frank Miller and his rise from Daredevil to Ronin to RoboCop 2 (the movie), then back to any damn comic project he wants…
Kevin Smith : Thanks. That’s a compliment and a half.
NY Press : … and now (Event Comics proprietor and Daredevil artist) Joe Quesada has brought you in to write a six-issue run of Daredevil for Marvel…
Kevin Smith : That was a real vote of confidence. It’s been a challenge, too — both for me and for Joe and Jimmy. I’ve had to labor like hell to come up with a storyline that we’d never seen in ‘Daredevil’, and Joe and Jimmy have had to labor like hell to get me to meet my deadlines. Unfortunately, we were shooting “Dogma” while the first DD issue was due, so there was a lot of , “It’ll be on your desk tomorrow,” that Joe, Jimmy, and especially Nancy (the editor) had to put up with. I know those cats are ecstatic that I’m done with the film — it means they’ll start getting their scripts on time.
I’ve seen artwork on the book, and it’s beyond what you’d expect from Joe and Jimmy. There’s some simply gorgeous stuff on those pages. Those boys have outdone themselves.
As for the storyline… I’m not saying a word.
NY Press : Stan Lee (founder of Marvel Comics) has a cameo in Mallrats, your second movie. Has he given you any feedback on the Jay and Silent Bob books?
Kevin Smith : I haven’t seen Stan since ComiCon last year, at which the Oni stuff wasn’t out yet. I guess I’ll get his take on it in August at this year’s Con(though I’m sure it will be something like, “Watch that language, Spider-friend.”)
NY Press : Would you consider an on-line comic series for one of the titles you’ve been given to resurrect? Mike Carlin (DC editor) might be open to the idea for the Green Arrow series, especially as you’re thinking of bringing back (alter ego) Oliver Queen. Granted, the quality of on-line comics has a ways to go, but is it an option?
Kevin Smith : Nope. GA’s for the four color page only.
NY Press : If you had your druthers, who are some of the artists you’d like to work with?
Kevin Smith : Working with Wagner was a dream come true. Beyond him, everyone else seems like gravy at this point– icing on the cake.
But I would like to work with Tim Sale. I love the stuff he’d done on the ‘Batman Halloween’ specials. And wouldn’t you like to see a Frank Miller rendition of ‘Jay and Silent Bob?’
NY Press : Your comics are kind of Modern Romance type comics — never a truly popular comic form in this country, the big exception being the ones with a touch of porn a la Penthouse Comics. Why not do shojo manga in Japan — your stuff is VERY Rumiko Takahasi (the creator of “Ranma 1/2” and “Maison Ikkoku”, she is the foremost female comic creator in Japan.)
Kevin Smith : I’m not sure if she’s the one, but there’s a Japanese artist who’s illustrating a ‘Chasing Amy’ book for release in Japan, to coincide with the release of the film there next month. I can’t wait to see it.
NY Press : Would you do a series from a non-superhero, female perspective? A Love and Rockets-esque title in the future?
Kevin Smith : I’ll be writing some strong female characters in ‘Daredevil’ and ‘Green Arrow,’ but I can’t see myself writing something like ‘Love and Rockets.’
NY Press : Your comic book store, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, in Red Bank NJ, has become the comic lover’s mecca of late — I know guys who could easily pick up the latest titles at St. Mark’s Comics or Forbidden Planet, but insist on renting a car once a month and driving out to Red Bank just so they can write “A Stash Score” in red ink on the Mylar bag they keep the comic in. You gotta love that…
Kevin Smith : Makes me feel great. We see a lot… and I mean A LOT… of out of state traffic at the Stash. The fucked up thing is that they sometimes feel that entitles them to a discount of some sort. When someone comes in and says, “I drove all the way from Long Island to come here, how about twenty percent off?” we smile and offer, “Yesterday, we had folks from Alaska in here, man. Trek more than fifty miles and we’ll talk percentage off.”
NY Press : The Kevin Smith Legend goes like this: you sold your comic book collection to help finance your first movie, Clerks. Then, after the movie turned a profit, you bought ’em back. But what I want to know is, what was the first comic you splurged on, the one you bought because you finally COULD, you know what I mean?
Kevin Smith : There hasn’t been a book like that in years. Back when I was collecting EVERYTHING (prior to “Clerks”), I once threw down the seventy bucks for the ‘Giant Size X-Men.’ That was about as extravagant as I ever got. To this day, I still can’t bring myself to pay huge prices for something that I should’ve had the foresight to buy for the cover price.
NY Press : And the elusive, “if I could only get my hands on that book I’d die with a load of spunk in my shorts and a smile on my face” title for you, as a, well, rabid collector?
Kevin Smith : A mint run of ‘Grimjack.’ Had one once, and now it’s next to impossible to get it all back as pristine as I’d had it.
NY Press : Oni Press aside, are we going to be seeing “Jay and Silent Bob Babies,” or “Kevin Smith’s Tiny Clerks Toons” on the Saturday morning cartoon circuit? Or will you leave the corruption of our youth to Trey Parker and Matt Stone?
Kevin Smith : We’re talking about putting together a “Clerks” animated series, actually.
NY Press : You were the guest of honor at the recent annual Pittsburgh ComiCon. How does it feel to be on the other side of the velvet rope in such a big way?
Kevin Smith : It’s nice to have a little respect in an industry you love. I’ve been asked to deliver the key-note address at this year’s ExpoMart at ComiCon International in San Diego. It always feels nice to be acknowledged.
NY Press : Ok, but most importantly, who’s longer, Jay or Silent Bob? (I mean sure, The Thing is strong, but Mr. Fantastic can stretch…) Or will the action figures be anatomically correct?
Kevin Smith : Only their hairdressers know for sure.
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