In bed with Josh Bauman
jeudi 4 février 2010
Kultur & Konfitur, Neukölln
Du 5 au au 26 février prochains, le Heroes accueille une exposition de Josh Bauman, dessinateur de comics, illustrateur et café-addict patenté. Nous l’avons interviewé pour en savoir un peu plus sur lui, ses influences, son processus créatif et ses projets en cours. Voilà le résultat, en anglais pour ne pas dénaturer ses propos, qui vous donnera très certainement l’envie d’en savoir un peu plus sur ce dessinateur brillant, inventeurs de scientifiques maléfiques, de vaches alcoolisées et de carburateur à la merde de chien, qui prend le métro de Berlin comme inspiration quotidienne…
When and why did you come to Berlin?
I came in August 2006, initially just for one year. I have a master’s degree in modern German history with a focus on gender studies. I came to learn German because I wanted to apply for a PhD program in the US. I was put on the waiting list and the person before me got a position, but I didn’t… I thought my application would be much better if I could speak German. So I came to learn German, I applied to school again, and the exact same thing happened!
So then you decided to stay in Berlin?
I realized that if I wanted to do something with art, it was going to happen in Berlin. After a few months here I got a job, teaching some private English lessons, and you know, in Berlin you can work a few hours a week and live on with 2 Euros a day… I enjoy teaching and being able to draw so many hours of the day.
Do you use your work about gender history in your drawing?
Yes and no… In my comics I take a rather cynical perspective. I don’t think I make mean comics, but I present things straight, without analysis, but I play with that too. Especially with my series of comics with this mad scientist, Dr. Arcoxtamox. He is supposed to be an evil scientist. But even though he has terrible plans, he can’t do any of these things because he is too nice inside. I play with some of these identities, but more in the sense of a satire. I like this character who really wants to be bad but can’t do anything wrong, he can’t get the girl of his dreams, she likes the superhero more, but the superhero treats her like shit…
Is it the last project you’re working on?
It’s an off and on project. I drew the first part in 2006. It was a completely different kind of comic for me. In the past few years I found out that I have more patience to make comics. In the past, my comics were always something that I would make in one sitting. I had the idea to use this character, and to see what he would look like if I would spend time trying to really draw like this. For the next chapters, I made more panels and I started to write a complete script and do more sketching. And then I even started to make thumbnails of the pages themselves, to think about the way that pages communicate information. I started to think about the medium a lot more. This is one style of comic that I’m doing and I’m still doing this comic about the alcoholic milk: just pen and paper, uneven lines, spelling mistakes… So there’s a mix of comics styles too.
You were speaking about the comics, but how do you work with the illustrations?
I’ve been trying to pay more attention, and this coincides with my time in Berlin, and also with the help of friends who are also illustrators and make comics. Even if you have one big image, you can tell stories. Without words you can still accomplish something, and you can create characters that exist in people imagination. So my illustrations and my comics aren’t so far apart, but I also use the U-Bahn for work, two half-hour trips each way into Charlottenburg for work, and I just draw on the U-Bahn, every day. You know, the U7 is my home. I just draw sketches, if I see people and I draw them, it’s stream of consciousness. For the illustration jobs or commissions I do, I always go back to my sketchbooks now. If somebody is looking for a specific kind of character, I can bring 25 pages of sketches and say “here, pick the character you want! Pick the style you want!” I use also these characters for my comics. So my U-Bahn sketches are the source of most of my work. That’s why I work from a sketchpad rather than book, just one sheet of paper, you rip it off, you stick it in the back of the pad, and it’s done. And at the end of the week, I have maybe 20 or 30 pages of sketches that maybe I’ll never use again.
Do you have recurring characters, like this mad scientist?
The Dingle was the first character that I had! When I was taking German class in the US, I drew almost all the time. The Dingle came from the sketches. It was only later that I started writing stories about him. I had a lot of troubles drawing comics because I used to do something in an afternoon. Fuck, if I couldn’t draw a whole page or a whole story in an afternoon, I would just stop in the middle and put the page away. I didn’t have the patience to do it. When I did have the idea for the story, I wanted to draw it in an afternoon so I tried to make a character, and usually the characters were not convincing. They had no life. When I started the Dingle, I said, yes, this character is me! I know this character so well. That’s why I use the sketchbook characters often. There’s a certain kind of energy into these things that are created on their own.
How do you find those crazy ideas?
It depends. Sometimes it’s a single sentence that I write down or I email it to myself. I send myself a message just saying a few words that for some reasons make sense. I have all this kind of emails that say something like “bicycle”, “night”, “dog”… It’s a specific idea for a character or a story. That’s how a lot of my paintings were done.
You email yourself, to remember? Emails are the new Moleskine?
I still carry notebooks with me but I’m not always in a place where I can really get out my book. In the most recent chapter of the mad scientist story, about the origins of the mad scientist, what made him evil. It’s him going on at a picnic with his girlfriend who is very sweet. There’re having a romantic evening, he wants to open a bottle of champagne, and the cork hits her in the eye and her eye flies out and he builds a new robotic eye, and then he’s trying to put the eye into her and he makes a mistake with the machine and it burns her… So then, he built her a robotic body and in the last few panels, it’s him going onto Facebook, editing his profile and changing his relationship status from “in a relationship” to “it’s complicated”. So this “it’s complicated”, I think I just emailed that line to myself.
What are your main influences?
When I was really young, I liked the Incredible Hulk, X men, Wolverine, Spiderman, but I never read those regularly. But what I read religiously was MAD Magazine. My mum had a collection of MAD magazines from the fifties to the sixties and it got me into a lot of trouble because it’s really… not humor for kids. My dad is a huge fan of Robert Crumb. I remember when I was like 15, this big book of Crumb came out and he bought it. It was on the coffee table, but it wasn’t something that I was supposed to read. With Crumb there are always very violent images, a lot of tits, blowjobs, violence towards women and men alike… So I would kind of sneak look at this, and a few years later, my mum gave me my own copy of that book… And when I was really young I was reading Calvin and Hobbes. It’s a kid that I really wanted to be. I had friends in school but I still lived in my imagination a lot, having an imaginary conversation with stuffed animals, I was always ok on using myself, like Calvin lives in his own little world. And I think that where making up stories came from.
Comics exhibition du 05 au 26 février au Heroes, Neukölln.
Vernissage vendredi 5 février : “Live drawing and caffeine specialties” !
