Dave Lapp has lived in Toronto for the last 20 years. His critically acclaimed collection of stories, Drop-In, based on his experiences teaching art at drop-in centres in some of the roughest places in Toronto, has been nominated for many awards. He also had an extended run at The Georgia Straight, the Vancouver weekly that carried his popular philosophical comic strip Children of the Atom for many years. This year, Conundrum Press will collect these beautifully crafted strips, releasing the volume at TCAF in May.
I talked with Lapp last week. Here are some highlights of our long conversation.
BEGINNINGS AND PROCESS
Howard: Why did you want to draw comics? Do you remember? It that too simplistic a question?
Lapp: I always felt that I really understood the language of comics. The thrill I felt, the resonance of a beautifully done comic made me wish I could do that. I thought the satisfaction of reading a great comic could maybe be surpassed by creating one.
Howard: Were comics an extension of your OCAD [Ontario College of Art and Design] training, of your art?
Lapp: I liked the idea that you could just do your own thing and make a living from it. I mean, I didn’t understand the complexities regarding business and percentages and numbers, but I thought there might be a way to crack the code of these things. I mean, how do you survive? Doing the art was never a problem, I’ve never stopped drawing. But, the thing that can effect my thinking sometimes was how can one afford to keep drawing, especially considering graphic novels take years to produce.
That’s a significant perspective you have to develop – an unpleasant one. You just want to draw your art, do well, then people buy the books, maybe buy the originals and that’s it. But it’s not that simple.
Howard: Can you talk about your process? What has been the approach that has worked?
Lapp: Well – put it this way – here I am giving a preface of sorts about numbers and percentages, but the thing is, I’ve had to accept the possibility of not making any money from the comics. Not in a meaningful page-rate, hourly-rate, livable way.
Howard: A living wage you mean?
Lapp: A living wage? No. Not at all. Not even close. When you crunch the numbers, it just becomes silly. If you go that direction, you’re at risk of the question, “What’s the point?” And that’s…death. You can’t make assumptions of making money or getting attention or winning awards. Those things should not be out in front of you anyway. You should be finishing the work, doing it well, and then, “There, now I’m done.” There is some real satisfaction in that. I believe the real currency we deal in is attention.
Howard: Do you find your connection is not just in the medium but rather the ideas you want to convey through the medium? Are you addressing bigger issues as you are expressing yourself in this art form? I’m thinking specifically of Drop-In. You’re dealing with some big issues in Drop-In.
Lapp: I sometimes come at it backwards. The big issues I was dealing with in Drop-In were a lot bigger than I ever would have realized. I know that’s also true with some of the stuff in Children of the Atom. It’s pretty obvious I’m processing there. I believe there’s a weight to what I do, I like to think that there’s some meaning in it. I had a really good teacher in OCAD named Ross Mendes. He really encouraged accepting ambiguity. All my work has that acceptance built into it. I hope the stories are clear, the meaning is clear, but if they’re not that’s just part of the art of it.
Howard: There is never just one interpretation.
Lapp: No, because Drop-In came from a whole whack of mini-comics. I never intended those stories to be collected as a book. If anyone’s seen the Window mini-comics [from which the Drop-In stories are taken], it’s obvious that the theme was not solely about the art centers, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff in there. Drop-In looks nice and consistent because we cut out all the other stuff. So there’s a bit of an illusion.
Cover of Dave Lapp's Drop-In, published in 2008.
Now, mind you, the dominant thing I was responding to during that time was some of the difficulties and intrigues that were going on at the art centre I was working at. Over time I wrote more and more about that, but I sure didn’t start out that way.
WORKING WITH KIDS
Howard: What were the art centers you were working at? Do you feel comfortable talking about that?
Lapp: I’ll just say the main one, it was Art Heart at Regent Park.
Howard: What were the years you worked there? Are you working there now still?
Lapp: I was doing that work from at least November 1996 to November 2009. But no, not now, sadly the program’s on hiatus, they ran out of money and significantly reduced the days the program is open, so I’m going with “wait and see” for now.
Howard: You’ve had at least once a year a show of the kids’ work that was produced there, right?
Lapp: Yeah, for a solid 12 years we had the Jet Fuel Coffee Shop Annual Art show.
Howard: This is work from the drop-in.
Lapp: Yeah if the kid’s work sells, the kids get the money. We sold paintings and prints for $25 dollars each. We’d keep $5 for the frames and the snacks and stuff, and the kids would get $20. There were tons and tons and tons of kids over 12 years, god. You know, money they made from those events, and seeing their work on the wall, and seeing the red dots, I mean it was just the full, full experience. Handing out envelopes with a bunch of 20-dollar bills in them, right near Christmas every year to all these happy kids…I felt like I was doing something right. Talking about projects and art, I was working on the comic pages and such, but it wasn’t my whole life. I like being involved in projects. I can look at Drop-In as a project, Window as a project, but I don’t think I’m capable of being fully consumed by the works, and just doing those all the time. I like teaching!
ORIGINAL ART AND HISTORY
Howard: You occasionally buy original comic art online. Who do you like? You like the originator of Archie?
Lapp: No, the originator of Archie was Bob Montana, but the guy that I liked a lot was Dan DeCarlo, and very specifically the earlier stuff – 1959 or ’62. I think after a while he started getting a brother or cousin to start inking, and it wasn’t as good, but the early Dan Decarlo was great.
Howard: What do you like about it?
Lapp: Well. I like seeing some of the errors, the little mistakes, corrections that remove the perceived sheen of perfection that comes from seeing the printed work.
Howard: In the original art.
Lapp: Once you get past the perfection aspect there’s a beauty to it that’s indescribable. Listen, the DeCarlo art, for example, I mean those are 15 by 20 inch pages. They’re huge. And I’m thinking. “Boy, you think you’re having trouble doing your graphic novel on your eight and half by eleven or eleven by seventeen? Here’s a fifteen by twenty inch page, try one of these a day.” I just marvel at the capability of these men, doing this, day after day. The beauty and craft in the work is incredible! And that these guys are doing it day after day – it’s hard to explain. The original art inspires me. Seeing the originals is not like seeing the comic, no way, not even close.
Howard: Is it like there’s a connection to that person? Is it like they were on that board, you can see their hand in the line, the weight of the line?
Lapp: I feel like it’s a bounce from the surface. I mean there’s a creator there – maybe they’re no longer alive – but all his skills are reflecting off of that page. Analyzing an original allows one into a partial step of the thought processes of the creator! Pencil lines, white out, scraped areas, paste-overs – it’s a direct connection. Any cartoonist can relate. I was very, very fortunate to get Severin and Elder Two Fisted Tales pages.
Howard: Wow.
Lapp: Those are friggin’ hard to get. They never come up for sale. The point is, by having that original art you can see where Kurtzman went in and inked it or scraped stuff away, and you’d never ever be able to detect that in the comics or even the Russ Cochran reprints. And just seeing where Kurtzman did this or did that, or fixed things – it’s just indescribable. I am so hooked on original artists, it’s just ridiculous.
Howard: So you get a connection to history?
Lapp: I have such an incredible admiration for these guys, doing this work, working so hard, so skilled, so beautifully done. I mean these guys were getting a paycheque, but they were getting very little fan attention. I don’t know what attention beyond “hand it in at this time” or “good job, you’re great” or whatever. I mean nowadays people can get tons and tons of attention by just putting something on the web. Whether their work’s at that level or not, there’s a lot of instant gratification.
Howard: Would you recommend this as a sort of exercise for other cartoonists, budding cartoonists, to experiment with?
Lapp: Buying original art?
Howard: Just seeing it, getting a connection to it. Buying it, yes, I guess.
Lapp: Yeah, they’ve had two shows that I can think of that showed original art. One of them was at the [Toronto] Reference Library. They had a bunch of Chester Brown Louis Riel originals. And they had another one down at Harbourfront, They had a whole variety of artists past and present down at Harbourfront. The Doug Wright Awards showed some art one year. I guess the easiest access to original art is on the Internet.
Howard: So if you find a place that’s showing original art, then go take a look?
Lapp: Yeah, the original comic art, it’s remarkable what goes into it. Now, the shift with a certain age bracket, too, is, “What do you mean original art? You mean a file? A print out?”
Howard: Right – the technology’s changed, so much of it is now virtual.
Lapp: I’m from the generation where a comic page is a hand-drawn thing. There’s a generation that would ask, “What do you mean, hand-drawn? You mean scanned in, or done on a tablet or program right?” I don’t want to go into detail about tech stuff I don’t totally know about, but with a lot of today’s comics the chance are that no art was done on paper, that it’s all done on a computer, is pretty common. In fact, I was doing a really detailed page with lots of cross hatch and graphic patterning and someone said, “Make sure you let the people know it’s hand-done.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said “Well they’re going to think you just picked something out of photoshop.”
That’s a very real transition. There’s an archive, and history, where you can get a real connection to it, the art-appreciation of it, which is now disappearing.
DREAM JOURNALS
Howard: I wanted to talk about your dream journals. I always found that fascinating, and talking about it with you really opened my mind up to how comics work. I really liked the idea that you would wake up from your dream and you would put your dream down as a comic, without words.
Lapp: The philosophy of it was, “Hey man, if you’re going to censor your own dreams, you’re screwed.” Dreams are pure – your own pure thoughts. Who’s responsible for this? It’s you. You can point your fingers at government or TV or whoever, but that’s your own personal filter in there. When you are willing to draw it and write it out…
Howard: How did it feel?
Lapp: It’s awkward, it’s awkward. Sometimes you don’t like what comes out.
Howard: Do you feel by drawing the picture you’re almost reliving it, in a way? Bringing it out from the unconscious?
Lapp: Yeah, I think at the time I doubted my…perspectives on reality. And I was doing my autobiographical comics and as I drew my dreaming life, it seemed more real than my waking life. The transition I was experimenting with was documenting dreams compared to documenting real life, and the real life autobiographical work maintained some of the dream quality. That was a little bit of magic realism in my autobiographical work. It was fun to do, but it was making me really crazy.
Howard: You can only spend so much time in your own personal mythology.
Lapp: You know, in the end, doing my dream journals, reading into them, I realized, if there was some kind of deeper meaning here, this process was not unlocking them. There was not magical door that would solve all my problems.
Howard: Did it find it made you do better comics?
Lapp: It made me appreciate narrative. Just getting your ass in the drawing chair, just having something to draw. Something. Just draw something! Are you going to pace around, wring your hands? Just draw something. Are you done yet? Don’t have any ideas? Draw the dream. You’re not sure what to draw? Draw the dream. Did you have a dream last night? Yes? Well draw the dream. A part of my philosophy is to always try to draw some increment above zero, however small. Sometimes when I’m getting stuck I just draw one panel. Can you draw one panel please? How about one word balloon? Anything above zero and it’s not “nothing”. So those dreams really helped me to be well above zero.
But I stopped doing them because they were driving me crazy. I have hundreds of pages of the stuff. But it’s awkward, awkward to read.
Howard: I really see this as a wonderful exercise to getting connected to primal images. It’s been our conversations, and your dream journal, that brought me the idea that comics more accurately reflect cognition than prose does, and I find that a powerful idea. It’s image, its metaphor, its language – language is metaphor but it’s not prose, prose is spoken, and there’s so much of our cognition that is not spoken.
Lapp: Yes, right. I work with kids all the time, and as a simple solution I say, “Look you don’t have to put the words in, I’ll help put the sentences in for you later.” You know they’ve got the whole story done in their head – they’re spelling isn’t so good, but it’s all there, all the information is there, and I just write the words for them. But the first thing that comes out is the pictures.
TODAY
Howard: Who are you reading now, old and new?
Lapp: Oh, I’ll give you the most recent things I’ve picked up, it gets pretty eclectic. I frequently visit ABC books on Yonge. Just yesterday I picked up American Elf and Little Orphan Annie and a collection of Krazy Kat Sundays. I picked up those three books, they cost me $30. I walked out of the store feeling happy. Those are three I’ve got on the go. I’ve just finished reading David B., Epileptic, and Louis Trondhiem, Little Nothings.
Howard: Where do you get your books?
Lapp: Mostly from ABC and BMV books. If I have to have that new book that I know I’ll never see in a used-book store, then I’m happy to go to The Beguiling.
Howard: Where do you get your art supplies?
Lapp: Above Ground. I just like the old house, and the stairs creek, and there are nooks and crannies. I like that store a lot
Howard: Your day jobs – you teach?
Lapp: Yeah, at AGO and Avenue Road Art School.
Howard: What’s your latest project? Do you have something on the go now?
Lapp: I have a couple of hundred pages of pencils, finished pencils, for a fully conceived graphic novel. I’ve been working away on this for awhile. My estimation is another 200 pages, and then I’ll ink them all.
