LUDIC LOG

It's Interview Friday here at the Ludic Log, and our second semi-celebrity is the lovely and talented Calamity Jon Morris. Jon is one of my finest invisible friends, he runs a website chock-full of his astonishingly spiff comic art, he created Jeremy and co-created Boo!, and he helped illustrate this very site's charming and delightful holiday story, The Christmassiest Elf. And as if all that weren't enough, he is the editor and creator of Gone and Forgotten, a compendium of cretinous comic books which has proved inspirational and excruciatingly funny to thousands of soul-damaged geek children like myself. So, without further ado, my interview with Mr. Jon Morris!

1. Tell us everything important about Calamity Jon Morris.

To start with, I am a vertebrate, but in these tumultuous and uncertain times, you really shouldn't take anything for granted. Although I have been a vertebrate for thirty years and nothing has even so much as threatened to change my vertebrate status, it's probably still not wise to count on it...even though, as I think of it, I was born into a large family of vertebrates and additionally come from a long line of vertebrates -- winners, every one of them. Living in a largely vertebrate community while growing up certainly shaped and influenced the direction of my spinal life.

I suppose things really started coming together for me with the aggregation of cells into masses dedicated to specific functions of the human body. Around the time that I developed a circulatory system, it was only a matter of time before I tried my hand at warm-bloodedness. Most kids my age do, I suppose, and my family was particularly supportive of experimentation with endothermicity.

Beyond that, what is there to say? Like most mammals, my young gestate within the womb and I regulate body temperature by sweating, via a body-wide netting of porous skin. Oh, here's something interesting your readers might like : I'm omnivorous.

2. Comic books, as you once observed, are written for apes and mental patients. Why is it that so many psychologically stable non-simians continue to be obsessed by them? What's wrong with us?

Chet, I'm going to have to go with 'we just ain't smart.' Or, in Klingon, "Ha'at Cha'ak Laa'at!"

Seriously, despite my coining the phrase, I have no idea why otherwise rational adults would spend any time, energy or money developing an emotional attachment to -- by way of example -- a man with a retarded saffron-abhorring magic ring and a Georgia O'Keefe painting living on his shoulder for a pet. I'VE SEEN PEOPLE COME TO BLOWS OVER GREEN LANTERN, FOR CHRISSAKES!

And then what baffles me even further is how these folks eventually evolve into the crowd who read stilted, emotionally-absent hollow hipster bemoanings AND THINK THAT'S ANY BETTER THAN SUPERHEROES! What are we avoiding here -- cliché? Absurdity? Contrivance? HOW YOU ENJOYING YOUR GOTH HUMOR BOOK FROM HOT TOPIC, SON?

3. Explain the appeal of Jack Kirby to a theoretical person who has never heard of him. You can make him an alien if you want.

Wait, who's the alien now? Jack Kirby?

Okay, well, Jack Kirby is an extraterrestrial lifeform, I guess, capable of reproducing via spores released solely in low gravity atmospheres of dense gas giants. Outfitted with a multifunctional carapace, Jack Kirby is largely free of conventional bone structure. Rather than cartilage and tendons attached to a skeletal structure, his body is given support by literally miles of spun silicate webbing attached to methane-filled bladders on the interior of his dense epidermis. Like other extraterrestrials in the industry at the time, he was employed at Ruby-Spears animation for several years. Jack Kirby eats his food through literally a million mouths, tiny flexing orifices ribbed with microscopic, razor-sharp hairs which render his diet of tough minerals and essential metals into a palatable liquified form. His thorax is a nuclear furnace, capable of atomizing steel, and also he revived the Newsboy Legion in 1971 and it rocked.

4. As the world's strongest cartoonist, is there anyone in the business who could take you in a fight?

Dan fucking Brereton. Some guys could scratch me up a little or maybe tire me out, but Dan Brereton is a freaking human iceberg. I think he has the mythical powers of Antaeus or something, where his strength is limitless as long as his feet touch the earth.

You know what I would do if I were fighting Antaeus, by the way? I'd wait until he was in the 'up' elevator and I'd jump him with a bike chain.

5. Like Chris Ware, you like playing comical or archaic musical instruments. What's the story?

Since when are the banjo, the bagpipes and the harmonica...no, wait, you got me.

I reckon it's got something to do with how I've dedicated my life to an artform which is generally about as lively and relevant as woodcuts, and only slightly less respected than mimes who juggle.

6. Say something nice about your wife.

Someday, I will buy a racehorse, and I will name that racehorse "Kate's My Girl." And it will win all the time, except when gangsters bet on it, to preserve the universal justice. Or at least that'll be my story.

7. No interview is complete without whoring. Tell me something about Jeremy, something about Doc Homunculus, and something about a Jon Morris thing we can go buy.

Jeremy is this charming, Ignatz-nominated comic strip about a Frankenstein boy which I would produce week after week for months on end and in turn receive about two positive pieces of e-mail. Then, for one reason or another, I'd have to skip a week every few months, which would result in fifty emails calling me a bunch of swears.

Doc Homunculus is a high-comedy adventure series combining everything that is good in superhero comics, and which will generate about two decent pieces of e-mail until I miss a ship date and then I'll get fifty emails full of swears. So it goes.

If you have money burning a hole in your pocket and you decide to NOT buy the Randy Bowen-sculpted Jack Kirby and Stan Lee busts for some insane reason, you can throw some of that wad away on a copy of BOO! HALLOWEEN STORIES, a collaborative comic put together by me and my pal Manning Krull, and which is available here.

If you want, leave me a note when you order a copy and I'll replace the word "BOO" with "AWW" and draw hearts with a laundry marker over all the jack-o-lanterns, so it'll be a timely Valentine's present.

8. Wishing for success in the comics field is sort of like wishing to be the world's leading buggywhip manufacturer. Since there's only room for one jillionaire in the business, and the role has been filled by Alex Ross since Todd McFarlane blew all his cash on used baseballs, tell me what your career will look like if everything goes right.

I'm sort of shocked to find out that everything isn't going right as of this moment. What do you know and who told you?

My wisest career move to date has been to fervently and ferociously refer to myself as nothing more than a hobbyist in the field of cartooning, which means that I get to play house with the facade that it's not fame and fortune that've eluded me, but rather that it's me who's deliberately dropping discreet barbs in the society column and making them feel uncomfortable about attending my coming out party. Also, I not omly mix metaphors, I fuck their sisters and put their discreet nude photos up on the web for everyone to see. Fucking metaphors. I don't even know how you are anymore.

9. Homeboy question: how is it, living in the AZ these days? How does it seem compared to back when we were little kids (here I'm assuming that you're nearly as ancient as I am, and that you lived there back in the Wallace & Ladmo days)?

Those're the mythic sea creatures who smashed sailors against jutting reefs and drowned them in mighty whirlpools, right?

For those of you who satisfied the warden in ways he thought no man could be pleased, and thereby successfully escaped this boiling desert waste, I say this to you - congratulations, and please follow these directions closely. Place one end of a very long rope in a plain brown envelope and mail with all haste to me, general delivery. Since you'll need to maintain a constant grip on the other end of the rope, I recommend Priority Mail. When I have the end of the rope, I will tug twice. At that point, please pull until you've evacuated me to whatever undoubtedly more hospitable landscape you inhabit.

Arizona is not a place, it's a tragic series of misunderstandings between human beings and weather. We, for instance, prefer to breathe air which isn't conveniently packed between cushioning layers of dust, and likewise would rather not be killed by jets of white-hot flame shooting randomly from the sky. Weather, on the other hand, is a fucking comedian and keeps its hot plate on ALL THE TIME even though the R.A. clearly informed it that hot plates are not allowed in the terrestrial dorms .

10. You not only inspired me to start a feature on my web site deconstructing retarded comic books, but your groundbreaking Gone and Forgotten feature has won you fame and fortune, if you define those terms to include an interview in a New England newspaper and a mention on This American Life. Do you feel like this is some minor payback for all those years you wasted reading stuff like "Superman vs. the Albino Apes of Jupiter"?

I've recently been informed that, under the new helm of 'hot young rock stars' who've recently taken over the Superman titles, that the three main monthly books would be split off into their own distinct continuities, which one being business as usual, the second returning Superman and Lois Lane to their unmarried lives, and the third being a dark and grim univese in which Lois has been murdered and Superman is a brooding figure of the night, and furthermore that a bunch of pre-crisis continuity is returning only it'll be more dark and suited to the Vice City generation, and that finally all three Superman will get together and duke it out for supremacy at the end of the year.

Which makes me long for the days of the Space Canine Patrol Agency, I tell you what.

One for the doctor: if you were watching the entire Rocky series on DVD, what would you eat, what would you drink, and at what point in the series would you stop watching?

As with most things in my life, I feel that once Mister T has had his say, there's nothing else productive left to be done.