AN INTERVIEW WITH DERF

In an effort to bring some sort of authenticity to this zine, we decided we should do a real interview for once. Michael Landon has long-since died so instead we turned to subversive political cartoonist John Backderf, or 'Derf' to his fans. Derf is widely known for his comic strip, The City, which appears in over 60 alternative newspapers across the country including The Village Voice,The Chicago Reader, SF Weekly, Denver Westword, St. Louis Riverfront Times ,The Progressive and the Cleveland Free Times. Derf has also been cranking out some comic books recently as well...

EASYMIDGET: Often cartoonists are profiled as eccentrics, loners, or people who enjoy sardines. Are you one of those people?

DERF: I love sardines. But I only eat the heads.

	ahh, Rebecca Romijn...Stamos that is...

EASYMIDGET: How has the web changed cartooning for you? Have you embraced it as one would a wet Rebecca Romijn or do you shun it like Oprah in the nude?

DERF: I must be out of the super-model/masturbatory loop... because I have NO idea who Rebecca Romijn is. I've had a website for some time— www.derfcity.com. It's great for readers who don't have a weekly paper in the area... and for selling a few t-shirts, but that's about it. Internet advertising is a joke, so much so I may just drop the ads of my site. When I started the site, the ads paid for it. Last year. I think the ads made me about $30...l FOR THE WHOLE DAMN YEAR! The only people making any dough off the web are the porn guys. So, from the business aspect, the web hasn't done much. Really, the best thing about the whole digital thing is that I now email my cartoon to all my papers and don't have to deal with the US Snail anymore.

[ click here to see full cartoon ]

EASYMIDGET: What's alarming to me is that today's popular cartoons seem to have descended to favoring writing over the actual skill of drawing. (See: Dilbert). Although writing is a crucial aspect to good cartooning, its prominence seems to have watered down the "art" of cartooning. How do you feel about the success of cartoonists who plainly cannot draw for shit but have witty ideas that make good desk calendars?

DERF: Well, here's the thing.... and don't think for a SECOND I'm defending Dilbert in any way... but MY quality of artwork has dwindled, too. It had to in order to remain legible. When I started in 1990, most papers ran strips big. Mine would usually be stripped across the width of a page. Only a handfuls of papers run it that size anymore. Most run it 75 percent of that, some even 50 percent. That way they can squeeze in one more futon ad. So I've had to really cut back on the detail... and pump up the size of the words... or the thing would look like mud. Daily papers, of course, run their cartoons even smaller. I don't know how anyone can draw that small. And this is all DESPITE the documented fact that cartoons are the most popular feature in the paper, daily or weekly. It's almost as if editors are jealous of this and are purposefully trying to fuck that up. "You want your cartoons? All right... try to read THIS."

EASYMIDGET: Do you think that appearing in alternative papers helps keep your edge or would you prefer to appear in dailies in a perfect world? Also would you ever water down your strips if you were guaranteed success in a mainstream market?

DERF: We are what we are. What I find funny apparently is considered too risqué for daily papers... even though, really, it's no more outrageous than what's on cable television, or network television for that matter. I think my socialist, anti-corporate stances scare them more than the edgy humor. Corporate media companies have no stomach for THAT. There's no clear line between alternative and mainstream anyways. For instance, Village Voice Media, which owns 10 or so big weekly papers, is bankrolled by a German bank! How "alternative" is that??? Weeklies are an "alternative" only to daily papers, which are simply hilariously square and out of touch. Unfortunately, The glory days of a bunch of idealistic 25-year-olds putting out a paper like the East Village Other or the Chicago Seed are long gone. It's all big business now. Happily, my stuff fits into the business model of weekly papers. A couple edgy cartoons, a sex-advice column, an astrology column, and a bunch of 900-ads.... that's a weekly paper right there. Not a good one, but, alas, a typical one.

EASYMIDGET: Has the fact that you're a cartoonist ever been the sole defining reason for getting you laid at one point in your lifetime?

	'Trashed', true tales from the back of a garbage truck, comes out Feb. 13th from Slave Labor Graphics

DERF: There was a real spike in the sex life once I started getting cartoons published, but I met my wife shortly thereafter so never got to enjoy a Robert Crumb-like life of debauchery. I guess, technically, that makes her a cartoon groupie.

EASYMIDGET: On getting your ideas: Do you frequently read newspapers and watch television to stay abreast of current events or do you just let things trickle into your head from every day life?

DERF: Yeah, both.

EASYMIDGET: Do you have any bumper stickers on your car?

DERF: Nope.

EASYMIDGET: When you were a little kid what was your favorite cartoon to watch on TV? Or, what were some defining events in your life that shaped your cartoonist's ego?

DERF: I was a big Banana Splits fan. And I loved the early Japanese shit, like Astroboy and Ultraman. Didn't have any influence on my art, and I hate the Manga crap that's everywhere now, but it was trippy stuff. Anyone notice that the Banana Splits theme song is actually a ripoff of Marley's BUFFALO SOLDIER? What do you think they were smoking over there at Hanna-Barbera?

Defining moments? In the 6th grade a classmate paid me $2 to draw a nude portrait of our teacher, which he then used for jackoff purposes, I assume. So at age 12, I realized there was money in cartoons. Then my senior year in high school, some peppy spirit monkey foolishly approached me to draw a poster of all the senior football players for a pep rally. These fuckers had made my life miserable for years. So I drew them all as musclebound gorillas with grotesque features. People howled when it was unveiled. The jocks wanted to kill me, of course... until I pointed out that the yearbook wanted me to draw stuff for them, too, SO DON'T FUCK WITH ME. It was then that I discovered the POWER of cartoons.

	[ click here to see full cartoon ]

EASYMIDGET: Who is your favorite pop icon to lampoon?

DERF: Katie Couric's on-air colonoscopy remains the single greatest event of my lifetime. I keep mining it for material.

EASYMIDGET: Many cartoonists tend to be anti-artists in the sense that they accept what they do as art while others in the fine art community find it childish tripe. What is it about cartooning that the wine-sipping goatee-and-beret community despise so much in your opinion?

DERF: Do they despise us? Comic strips have achieved a certain intellectual status, even from the snobs, especially as the Baby Boom has taken over all the museum boards. Comic books haven't... and, in most cases, rightly so. As much as I love comic books, most of it is absolute crap. But guys like Crumb and Spiegleman certainly have. The state of cartooning, as an art form, is far healthier and vibrant than that of "fine" art, which is completely fractured and economically withered. I myself actually had a retrospective show in an art museum in 1999. No one was more surprised than me... but it was very well received by the art community and, apparently, by the public.

EASYMIDGET: How much has fine art (i.e. stuff that hangs in a gallery) influences your approach to cartooning?

DERF: Actually, quite a bit. I am heavily influenced by the Expressionists of the early 20th Century. That's where all the jagged lines, the heavy blacks and the tortured perspective comes from. Max Beckman, Otto Dix, Frans Masereel, all those guys. It was the first art movement that was urban, that was commercially oriented and was overtly political. I'm not interested in still lifes or religious painting. There has to be content, and some connection to real, modern life. The Expressionists paid a heavy price, too. The Nazis ran most of them off. Fascinating stuff. Expressionism filtered through a post-punk lens... that's my style right there.

EASYMIDGET: Do you find social commentary or being humorous more important in the creation of your cartoons?

DERF: Oh I'm only going for laughs. I'm not out to save the world... nor am I deluding myself that I have something intelligent to say. It's a humor strip. That's not to say I don't believe in what I'm saying... but if it isn't funny, it doesn't make it to print. I'm not required to comment on the issue of the day, like an honest-to-god political cartoonist. Now... post Sept. 11 that attitude has changed a bit, yeah. But hopefully I'll be getting back to cartoons about bodily fluids and Viagra soon.

EASYMIDGET: Many cartoonists say they have to remain "neutral" in their political convictions in order to keep their cartoons lively. Is this how you feel or do you have an agenda that subliminally leaks into your ideas?

DERF: That's crap, of course.... what those cartoonists MEAN is that they must remain "neutral" in order to keep their jobs. I assume we're talking about political cartoonists here. And "neutral" means toeing the pro-business, politically conservative line of their corporate lords and masters. These clowns are getting $80-90,000 to draw this shit! I read recently that over the past decade the number of political cartoonists has dwindled by a third. Daily papers don't want a cartoonist who actually has a strong opinion about an issue.... Papers just want a cartoonist to illustrate the news. So most just use the same 3 bland syndicated ones. Look at all the post Sept. 11 crap. How many "weeping Statue of Liberty" cartoons did you see? How many "Where's Waldo-Osama" ones? They all draw alike, they all think alike. They do both badly. It's pathetic.... but, of course, only a reflection of the state of daily newspapers in this country.

EASYMIDGET: We've all loved your movies "Dorf on Golf" and "Dorf Goes Fishing". To what do you attribute the success of those fine films and what will be the next film in the series?

DERF: "Dorf's Anal-Sex Assault"

EASYMIDGET: What are your plans for the future of "The City"? In other words, in your mind is this strip a vehicle to an animated series or a comic book-related endeavor for instance? I say this because you say you were initially interested in drawing comic books but decided not to because someone told you there was no money in it when you were younger.

DERF: Well, my first comic book will hit the shelves on February 6. TRASHED is the sordid tale of the year I spent on the back of a garbage truck at age 19. Available from Slave Labor Graphics. So, yeah... I'd like to do more stuff like that. Sadly, there really is NO money in comic books these days. It's a dead industry. I'm hopeful I can make enough to make the effort worthwhile, but I've no delusions about millions pouring in. I'd like to do a White Middle Class Suburban Man book, too. I've started it, but it's slow going... mainly because I'm a slacker. I'm not opposed to doing something else, like TV, but I don't like to compromise. I want to do what I want, how I want. That's not TV. Crumb is my hero in this regard. He never compromised. Not a line. And yet he achieved considerably exposure doing what he did, some of which was absolutely salacious, especially for the day. I've never come close to his stature

EASYMIDGET: Where do you see yourself five years from now?

DERF: Dunno. I suspect I have more years (12) behind me with The City than I have in front of me. I can't do this forever... especially since weekly papers target an audience 20-40 and are pretty damn heartless about jettisoning contributors who hit the demographic wall. That's why I'm dabbling in comic books. Got to have some other stuff going on.

Drawing on his actual personal experiences at high school with Dahmer, Derf's 'My Friend Dahmer' comes out in March.

EASYMIDGET: You made a comic book based on your years at high school with Jeffrey Dahmer. Do you think he got a bum rap? I mean at least he had the decency to store his body parts in a refrigerator whereas other people of varying degrees of insanity would just let the bodies rot in their apartments...

DERF: And the Compleat Dahmer stories will be on the shelves in March, thanks for asking. It took me 6 years, but I finally finished the damn thing. Not the easiest book to write, obviously. MY FRIEND DAHMER will be available on the website or in finer comix shops nationwide. I really don't think a lot about Dahmer the serial killer. I'm fascinated with his spiral into madness, which I witnessed firsthand in high school. I think there are real lessons there, the cost of ignoring the Dahmers and the kids who wig out and mow down their classmates.

EASYMIDGET: Did you ever see Dahmer talk to a girl?

DERF: Can't say that I did, no.

EASYMIDGET: I think you can get an accurate idea of somebody's persona by getting them to name some of their favorites. What is your favorite movie of all time; best film you've seen in a while; favorite band or style of music; the last book you read?

DERF: favorite movie of all time: Can't name just one. Best film I've seen in awhile is Apocalypse Redux, which I suppose reflects how bad the film biz is these days. Mulholland Drive was great, too.

Favorite band/style of music: Again, can't answer that. Lately I've been listening to Dropkick Murphys, the Strokes, White Stripes, Steve Earle, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer and Charlie Parker.

the last book you read: Cat In the Hat... to my daughter. Dr. Seuss rules!

EASYMIDGET: In closing is there anything you want to get off your mind to the viewers of Easy Midget?

DERF: Nope.

EASYMIDGET: Thanks for you time Derf!