Declarations of independence

How creators of underground comics manage to keep thriving in the Bay Area

By Heather Smith

LAURENN MCCUBBIN IS a vivid reminder of the eclectic nature of art in the Bay Area. Her hair is red and streaked with platinum, her arms are covered with tattoos, and she is, as of this month, the new art director for traditionally superhero-dominated Image Comics. Her latest work, Rent Girl, written by Michelle Tea and lavishly illustrated by McCubbin, has also just been optioned for HBO by Tony Jonas, executive producer of Queer As Folk.

"We want it to be partially animated," McCubbin says. "The thing we had a hard time convincing people of is that hookers can be funny. I can't imagine why people don't understand. People are like, 'It's going to be such a sad show,' and I'm like, 'Have you read the book?' "

While McCubbin was an art student in Chicago, she began creating screen-printed images and writing stories around them. "A friend of mine, Nikki Coffman, said, 'Why don't you try and put these together like a comic book?' " McCubbin recalls. "I always loved comics. I read a lot of Love and Rockets when I was a teenager, but I never thought of doing them myself."

The initial result of her efforts was the self-published XXX Live Nude Girls and its sequel, XXX Live Nude Girls: Pretty Like a Princess. Their gritty view of sex, drugs, and hot waitresses places them squarely in a tradition of San Francisco literature stretching all the way back to the gold rush.

Comic books have been a part of the Bay Area's literary consciousness since at least 1968, when Gary Arlington opened the San Francisco Comic Book Co. at 23rd and Mission Streets and began pushing the somewhat disingenuously named Educational Comics (better known as EC) with patrons and contributors Kim Deitch, Robert Crumb, and Spain Rodriguez.

"The talent in the Bay Area is very, very deep," says Rory Root, owner of Comic Relief, a Berkeley comics shop. "APE [the Alternative Press Expo] has gone from a tiny show in San Jose to a huge extravaganza with 1,000 people attending and over 100 exhibiting, most of whom are local."

San Francisco's tradition of self-publishing and underground presses made the jump to underground comics fairly simple. Virtually every era and social movement in post-'60s San Francisco has been documented in comics as well as literature.

While Armistead Maupin chronicled the foibles of denizens of Nob Hill and the Castro in his Tales of the City series (which began running in the San Francisco Chronicle in the mid-1970s and continued in the Examiner through much of the 1980s), Phoebe Gloeckner was writing about the teenage hustlers on Polk Street in A Child's Life and Dori Seda was poking fun at artsy warehouse life in the South of Market neighborhood. Seda's comics, collected in the anthology Dori Stories, reveal how even then San Francisco's counterculture was obsessed with (a) nontraditional relationships and (b) its dogs.

Dan Clowes, creator of Eightball, was lured to the Bay Area by his wife, whom he met at a book signing at Comic Relief.

"You just can't justify having to live anywhere as a cartoonist," he says. "You don't get out much. You can buy art supplies through the mail. Plus, I actively didn't want to live in Chicago anymore. But then, pretty much any big city has cartoonists. They don't tend to live in the middle of nowhere. I guess the urban environment helps the anxiety that creates the tensions that produce art."

Clowes supported himself for years doing illustration before his comic Ghost World was optioned for a movie by Crumb director Terry Zwigoff. Now he writes screenplays, most recently for another Zwigoff movie, Art School Confidential, based on an earlier comic of his.

"I was very lucky," he says. "In this business you have no retirement, no health benefits. I'd be uncomfortable about turning 60 with nothing else to support me."

He's heard plenty of stories about the early days of underground comics. "They all came in 1967 and tell stories about how back then you could rent the entire top floor of a Victorian for $35 a month, live off welfare, and eat three meals a day," he says. "From what I hear, the city was welcoming to artists and weirdos. I never felt comfortable in San Francisco," the Oakland resident says. "In San Francisco you feel like there is a novel written about every street corner. It's all claimed. Spoken for. Oakland is virgin territory. It's like the West Coast Chicago. It has a decaying downtown. It's very comforting."

As a kid growing up in Berkeley, comics artist Ariel Schrag was always drawing little comic strips in her notebooks. In ninth grade she found some comics by Ariel Bordeaux at Comic Relief. "They were self-published and in a zine format. They seemed doable."

Comic Relief is well-known for supporting young comics artists. The teenage Adrian Tomine (now the author of Optic Nerve and an illustrator for the New Yorker) used to have his mom drive him from Sacramento so that he could sell his minicomics there.

The youngest comics artists carried at Comic Relief nowadays are 14-year-olds "Leslo" and "Delly." They started writing their minicomic, Hecter the Collecter (about a giraffe in a ski cap and his lady friend the "Silent Moon Fang Goddess"), at the tender age of 12. Schrag went back through her high school sketchbook and pulled a narrative out of the one-page comics she'd been doodling all year. She made copies of the result and sent them to all the cartoonists she could think of. Schrag's hero, Ariel Bordeaux, wrote back with the advice that she learn how to schmooze.

"At that point I didn't even know what she meant," Schrag says, "but then I found out it meant going to conventions and drinking a lot, which was not a problem for me."

Schrag's comics are an obvious extension of the underground comics she grew up reading. She writes frankly about her obsession with Gwen Stefani at age 14, losing her virginity at age 15, and her alternately giddy and heartbreaking relationship with her girlfriend, Sally. Schrag's youth and gender, however, made her a target for come-ons by older men.

"On the one hand, some older men, like my publisher, Dan Vado (of Slave Labor Graphics), were helpful," she says of her beginnings in the biz. "On the other hand, a lot of them were sleazy and inappropriate. Guys would follow my friend and me up to our hotel room and try to initiate threesomes with us. We were 16-year-old girls. It got gross."

Schrag has since gone on to attend Columbia University and write for The L Word, but she still gets together with artist Gabrielle Bell and draws a couple of nights a week. She'll always do comics, she says.

"Independent comics literally are independent," says Larry Young, co-owner of San Francisco comics publisher AIT/Planet Lar. "You can do whatever you want. Some guy's going to turn in a 400-page opus about going to the bathroom, and some other guy's going to say, 'I think Armageddon was the best movie ever, and here's my version of it.' "

Comic Relief owner Root says local publishers like Last Gasp, Image Comics, Slave Labor Graphics, and AIT all help a great deal, as do local art schools like California College of the Arts, Academy of Art University, and the San Francisco Art Institute, which all feed into the local talent pool. Companies like Lucas Arts and Pixar also employ a lot of animators and designers who do comics on the side.

All the people at local publishing collective Eville Press, for example, work at Pixar. As member Max Brace points out, "Our anthology Afterworks is, as the title implies, a collection of stories created by folks in the spare time they have after working at their day job. My story is called 'Sudden Cholecystectomy!!!' It is an autobiographical account of my emergency gall bladder operation."

"Comics [are] a great way for me to get a story out of my head and onto paper rather quickly," says Ted Mathot, also of Eville Press. "I say 'rather' because it will take me about a year to complete my comic Rose and Isabel. If I were to animate it, it would probably take 20 years."

"It's a thriving art," McCubbin says. "It's not as marginalized as it is in other areas. The only other place that I can say is as active a community is New York.

"But [it's] more expensive, ha ha ha."

Heather Smith is a writer who lives in San Francisco, ha ha ha.