It has been said by better men than I
that I am officially the worst interviewer ever. And while
I would like to imagine that this is a gross
understatement, I did receive weeks’ worth of hate mail
after my last interview (Harvey Pekar, on stage on front of
what turned out to be hundreds of psychopaths). So, when
our dear friend of the gutter, Chris Reilly, invited us to
interview him about his new anthology/jam comic,
Strange Eggs Jumps the
Shark, we decided
that rather than let me unleash yet another round of
letterbombs and anthrax mail, we would ask Chris to
handle both sides of the interview table. The
new Strange
Eggs volume
feature contributions from, well, Chris Reilly, of
course--but also from Jhonen Vasquez, Steve Ahlquist, and a
range of other contributor whose names, strangely,
do not
contain unlikely combinations
of consonants in close proximity. It is also very, very
funny and is being released from SLG this week. But before
I go and mess it all up again, let’s turn it over to our
guest interview and interviewee, Chris Reilly.
CPR: How did the original concept for
Strange Eggs come about?
CPR:
I actually am a big fan of Michael Kupperman and Eric
Reynolds from Fantagraphics just sent me a copy of the HC
Tales Designated to Thrizzle Vol. one and I would like to
conduct this interview by commenting on the quotes of this
book – would that be cool?
CPR: Sure, I guess, why not.
“Kupperman
writes a hysterically funny comic book.” -- Andy Richter
CPR:
I love Andy Richter and wish FOX would stop cancelling his
shows. The fact that his show “Andy Richter Controls the
Universe” was so short lived was a crime. It was
like Family
Guy, but for
smart people. I think Andy would love Strange Eggs Jumps the
Shark.
“Folks, this
is the funniest thing since Monty Python. I mean it. Every
page is a catch phrase waiting to happen.” -- Heidi
Macdonald, Publishers Weekly
CPR:
Heidi grabbed a great URL name… hope she liked
Strange Eggs Jumps The
Shark.
“Seriously
go buy this. Not only is it hysterical, it’s a major
influence in my comedy.” – Graham
Linheam
CPR:
Hell, he wrote episodes of
Alias Smith and Jones; I hope he liked Strange Eggs Jumps The
Shark, because I
love his work.
“Comedy crack cocaine for Silver age comic fans with a
sweet tooth for pulpy subject matter and dirty jokes. Dumb
jokes for intelligent people have never made anyone laugh
louder” --Wizard
CPR:
I don’t think this guy actually read the book.
Wizard
seems to have just cobbled
together a bunch of blurb worthy words. I did not send them
a copy of Strange
Eggs Jumps the Shark.
CPR: Could you please answer some questions
about the book?
CPR:
Fine.
CPR: Where did the concept come from?
CPR:
Eggs.
CPR: Would you be serious for just one
second!
CPR:
Fine.
CPR: The concept for strange eggs came from…
CPR:
Strange
Eggs’ co-creator
and good friend Steve Ahalquist’s came over my house with
the idea just about fully formed. His Wife Kathy, a real
sweet chick, runs a daycare and does a lot of real creative
stuff with the kids to keep their minds stimulated and
encourage creativity. On this day, she told the kids to lie
on the floor, curl into balls and pretend they were eggs.
CPR: That’s weird.
CPR:
Not really; let me finish the story. She then told the kids
to unfold; hatch and asked them what they’d hatched into
and to her surprise most of them were not birds or
reptiles, they were things like trucks, Winnie-The-Pooh
books and wrenches.
Steve told me the story and said we should make a comic out
of it.
CPR: Kids in his wife’s care pretending to
hatch into wrenches?
CPR:
No, kids that were delivered eggs that could hatch into
anything. Things like insane puppets, flying saucers,
robots, hobos, aliens or operas.
CPR: Were they always the same kids?
CPR:
Yes, twin brother and sister, Kip and Kelly Hatcher.
Originally Steve wanted Kip to be a scientist and Kelly to
be a dreamer, but I convinced him that Boy genius had been
done to death, so let’s have Kelly be the scientist,
married to logic and Kip the dreamer who just lived in his
head.
CPR: I read Strange Eggs Presents the Boxing
Bucket and
Strange Eggs Jumps the
Shark and I don’t
remember a lick of that characterization.
CPR:
You had to read the third book which was a graphic novel
called The Weirdly
World of Strange Eggs. That’s basically Strange Eggs the
movie, which was recently optioned as a film. Not the
Graphic novel, but the cast and concept.
CPR: You did a fucking all ages GN based on
a book as sick and twisted as Strange Eggs.
CPR:
Yeah, but if it makes you feel any better it didn’t quite
work as an all ages book; little kids loved it and adults
were indifferent. Lesson learned.
CPR: What Lesson?
CPR:
Never target an audience.
CPR: Okay, enough about the history of
Strange Eggs, let’s talk about Jumps the
Shark.
CPR:
Whatever, man, it’s your interview.
CPR: Why “jump the shark”?
CPR:
Jumping the shark means a lot to me. As most know that’s
when Fonzie jumped a shark tank on Happy Days and this, for me, was a bad thing. It was
broadcast on September 20, 1977. In the third of the three
parts of the "Hollywood" episode, Fonzie
(Henry
Winkler),
wearing swim trunks and his trademark leather jacket and
boots, jumps over a confined shark
while water
skiing. This
was particularly ironic, in that Fonzie, famous for being a
biker, had previously jumped his motorcycle for a publicity
stunt, over 14 garbage cans—but was severely injured in the
process, and very remorseful for his actions; he then
learned a valuable lesson, and delivered a moral message,
that taking foolish risks "isn't cool" (a clearly
role-model message against popular 1970s trends of youths
imitating daredevil stuntmen like Evel
Knievel or Ernie
Devlin). In
contrast, Fonzie's later decision to take an even greater
risk on water skis "to prove a point" came across as absurd
in many ways (particularly since the "motorcycle jump"
episode was a major point in Fonzie's character
development).
The infamous scene was seen by many as
betraying Happy Days' 1950s setting and its earlier
character development by cashing in on the 1970s fads of
Evel Knievel and Jaws.
I saw Ron Howard on Bill Maher and he said the cast and
crew just stood there in horror, looking at Winkler in his
boots and leather jacket preparing the stunt and they were
all just saying “I can’t believe they are actually going
through with this – he’s really going to jump the shark.”
They managed to make Fonzie look un-cool and that is quite
an achievement.
Even odder was
that the episode before this three parter was entitled
“Fonzie's baptism” were after nearly being killed in a
stock car race crash, the Fonz questions his own mortality,
leading him to decide to be baptized. I guess God was going
to protect him from Jaws at this point. So religion plays a
factor in the origins of Fonzie's Jump the Shark, as it
does in our book.
CPR: Based on Jump the
Shark, you seem
to have a real problem with religion. Is that an accurate
statement?
CPR:
Absolutely not. I have a problem with organized religion. If someone believes in God,
Zeus, Ganesh or scientology and it makes them happy, I have
no problem with that. It is when it becomes organized it
becomes, in most cases, a group of psychological terrorists
no better than a common street gang. And they probably
steal more.
CPR: Most of the stories in
Jumps the
Shark are pretty
vicious towards religion. Would it be a safe bet to say
that all of the contributors are atheists?
CPR:
No, not really. I am an atheist, and I find atheists to be
about as annoying as Jehovah’s witnesses that knock on your
door and wake you up on Sunday morning, unless I’m drunk
and then I let them in. Pushing atheism down people's
throats is as obnoxious as people trying to cram god up
your ass in polite conversation. So, I don’t know what
people’s beliefs are that contributed to the book, because
I never asked. I know Steve (Ahlquist) is an agnostic. I
have no idea what Ben Towle's beliefs are. Actually, I do
know that Dave Ray is a Catholic because he once mentioned
to me that he was fasting for lent.
CPR: Do you consider Strange Eggs an attack on Christianity?
CPR:
No, I think of it as if Harvey Kurtzman had done an issue
of MAD in the 50’s and the subject was religion. It is
parody. Do I consider it an attack on stupid people? Yes,
absolutely. Thomas Jefferson said this in regard to
religion: “Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less
remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who
believes what is wrong.”
CPR: Any final words.
CPR:
I loved the new Star Trek Movie.