Broken Frontier

In next month's Drawing From Life, Jim Valentino presents an all-new collection of autobiographical stories. Since the release marks the first time in over 20 years that the Image co-founder releases autobio material, BF went to find out what made Valentino want to revisit the genre and share his emotions and experiences with the rest of the world...

BROKEN FRONTIER: You already have a history in autobio comics, going back as far as the late 70s. For people who were still kids or hadn’t been born then, can you tell us a bit more about where you were at at point in your career, and what the atmosphere was like in which you created these first autobio stories?

JIM VALENTINO: Oh, God, that made me feel OLD… please pass the Geritol, thanks. Um, well, I was at the very start of my career—very heavily influenced by underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb, Vaughn Bode, Justin Green, Jay Lynch and the like. Undergrounds were dying and photocopying was new so all of these homemade, self-printed comics were coming into vogue.

Inspired by the likes of Rick Geary, Clay Geerdes, Brad Foster and others I began making what are now called Small Press Comics (in those days, “newave commix”) and while I did them on many subjects, the autobio ones were the ones that got the most positive response.

BF: Are you drawing from a certain period of your life, or will the collection reflect on various stages of your life?

JV: Various periods of my life. I tend to lean toward telling the big or weird stories, the bizarre things that have happened to me as opposed to the mundane day-in-day-out stuff. Most of the stories I’ve drawn have started out as oral renditions. I’d tell them to people, gauge their reactions, get the timing down. Very much like a comedy routine. Then, I draw them up.

BF: Autobiographies can describe 100% actual events, but they can also feature a lot of fictional content, or, if you will, ‘modifications’ of reality. What are readers being served in your case?

JV: In all honesty a little bit of both. The events are 100% real, these things really happened to me. But the dialogue is the best I can recall, which means it’s probably not 100% accurate and, as noted in the last answer, these are told orally for years and years, so they’re fine-tuned, honed, if you will. But they’re all based on actual events as accurately as I can recall.

BF: In tackling a project like this, how far does someone have to go in terms of opening up his soul to his audience for an autobio comic to reach its full potential?

JV: I deal with that in the very first story in Drawing From Life. The story is called “A Talk With Deni” and it’s a conversation I had with the publisher of the Valentino books, Deni Loubert. Some of the stories are light and funny, some like “Sons” and “One For Granny” are so painful and personal I still cannot bring myself to read them. Haven’t since I wrote them.

BF: When sitting down and comprising this book, how do you decide what stories, anecdotes and events go into it and which ones don’t?

JV: In this case I have a file folder filled with notes, bits and pieces and outlines for stories that would have gone into more issues of the Valentino series. When I decided to do this book I re-read them all and chose those that were more developed or better than the rest. In the case of two of the stories, “Elephants” and “Big Ma” they were both still in the oral stage, nothing had ever been written down and I was encouraged by my editor, Kris Simon, to include them, so I did.

BF: Is the industry—and especially Image, which is publishing stories like CB Cebulski’s Wonderlost, and Tom Beland’s True Story, Swear To God and now your collection of stories - ready for more autobiographical stories?

JV: Well, I don’t know about the industry as a whole. Seems to me this industry is currently mired in the “event” comic. As for Image, it has always been open to all kinds of stories and genres right from the start.

This misperception that we were all about splash panels, shoulder pads, irrelevant hatching and vacuum cleaner guns has always been erroneous. And, certainly, for the five years I was publisher, we pushed that envelope even wider as reflective of my tastes which encompass everything from super-heroes to undergrounds.

BF: Since there are lots of reprints coming from Image that reintroduce classic material to a new generation of readers, what are the odds of us seeing a collection of your older autobio stories somewhere down the line?

JV: I’m planning on re-releasing Vignettes, A Touch of Silver and normalman within the next year. The new Vignettes volume will have the stories in chronological order, which puts a whole new light on them. The new A Touch of Silver book will reprint the final issue and a prose piece with illustrations explaining how the story ends. The normalman book, which isn’t autobio, but nonetheless close to my heart, will feature every single normalman page ever done as one of those big telephone books that Dave Sim pioneered way back in the stone age.

Drawing From Life #1 by Jim Valentino is projected for a May 30 release through Image Comics.