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These are the tools of a self-published cartoonist: pen, paper, a photocopier, stapler and high tolerance for under appreciation.
But Brad Neely, the artist behind Creased Comics who has been underground for so long, is now moving toward the surface. A bit.
An anthology of his work - collected from four self-published books and featuring 130 new panels - will come out in January 2005 with Lime Publishing.
The quiet success of Creased Comics is something Neely hadn't anticipated when he started drawing the series in 1996.
"The thing is, I do a lot of different stuff; I write, I draw, I do other art. I didn't expect Creased to be popular. It's kind of a distraction that got a mind of its own," he said.
Tracing his style
The Creased Collection will feature comics drawn between 1996 and now, Neely said.
"You can see some sort of evolution. In a single-panel format, the jokes can easily get old or stale. So I want to maintain some continuity of style while still making the material fresh and interesting," he said. "Some of the [earlier panels] - people say they come across as random, without meaning, like careless or pointless or funny in an abstract way. I've tried to make the humor more 'gettable.'"
It's hard to characterize the humor of Creased, Neely said, and the mechanics of each panel can't easily be described or dissected. "It's not really a 'man-walks-into-a-bar' kind of thing," he said.
"A lot of people would say that Creased is 'random' or 'absurd,' but I sort of resist that. It's complicated. The joke has to work in a couple ways - and of course, that's difficult to describe, how I make these jokes work."
Neely said that each Creased panel is a kind of snapshot.
"It's like taking a clip from a story, and it's up to the viewer to fill in what came before and what comes next," he said, flipping through a book of his comics. "A lot of these remind me of jokes from movies, but here you don't have the narrative line of the movie to support it."
That, however, is what makes Creased interesting - the imaginative engagement required to fill in the context, he said.
"When you're working with a single panel, you're limited. How do you make it interesting? How do you make it worthwhile? The very fact that people sometimes wonder at the meaning [of Creased] means I've done my job. There's no sense in making something that doesn't inspire that."
Neely's creative process involves drafting and re-drafting interesting ideas.
"Six or seven months will pass, and I'll decide it's time for some new comics," Neely said.
So for a month he'll walk around with a tablet, writing down ideas, bugging friends, asking them for advice.
"Once I have a lot of ideas, way over 100, I'll sit down and start drawing them. I'm a big fan of revision. Sometimes the first draft is cool, but often I rework it, figuring out the mechanics of the joke," he said.
Sometimes Neely will start with an image and craft a caption, and sometimes he'll start with a caption and craft an image.
"For example, in one, I started with this image of a moose standing in the majestic wilderness. So he's standing there ... and then what? What does he say?" Neely asked. In that panel, featured in Book 4, the moose stares off toward a jagged mountain range and thinks, "I have to get the f*** out of here."
The "joke" is often a surprising visual image - in one panel, a ballerina crouches on stage over the body of a dead horse, her face bloody, as the audience shouts "Encore! Encore!" And then there's another, where a woman, handcuffed to a baby she holds in her lap, says, "My first-born flew off."
Neely says that Creased details his perspective on life.
"I can't really define the doctrine of [Creased] or anything like that," Neely said. "But I don't like to comment on politics or celebrity or whatever ... I like to keep the humor on the existential level. If it takes a while to work it out, then perhaps it's more meaningful."
While the humor has changed slightly over the years, Creased's style has remained pretty consistent throughout, Neely said.
Neely, classically trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the "Old Master Style," describes the Creased aesthetic as a "self-consciously junky look."
"The way that I draw Creased Comics-that's specific to Creased. A lot of my other drawing is more like regular comic book art - more realistic. Creased started as almost like visual notes for other things-as goofy jokes I'd jot down for friends. Part of the joke is how crappy it's drawn."
A single-paneled world
"I've never really paid much attention to comics in newspapers," Neely said. "I like The Far Side, and I like Calvin and Hobbes, but a lot of it doesn't really interest me as much."
Neely arrived in Austin four years ago and began publishing his work in The Daily Texan in 2001. Before Austin he'd lived in Arkansas - where he was born and went to college - as well as Philadelphia and Chicago.
He started promoting Creased when he arrived in Texas.
"For a long time it just seemed like I was putting a lot of stuff in envelopes and sending it off to anybody who might publish me. If I wasn't lazy, I'd still be doing that, because I'm still not making any money."
The Texan picked up Creased for a year, not realizing Neely wasn't a student.
"Kinda like a phantom, I'd just creep down into the [Daily Texan] basement and drop my stuff off. I never talked to anyone there," he said.
Now Creased Comics books are sold at Funny Papers, Art House and Monkey Wrench Books in Austin.
"It's often a matter of who you know or knowing someone who knows someone," Neely said of his increased publication. His longtime friend, Laris Kreslin, who owns Lime Publishing, connected Neely with editors at both Vice and Minus.
Kreslin has been a fan of Creased since Neely started drawing the comic.
"He'd always hoped I would publish it," Neely said.
At Funny Papers, amid the glossy D.C. and Marvel comic books and a wall of graphic novels, there's a modest shelf of self-published local artists. These self-made comics are where much innovation in the medium occurs, but it can be thankless work, said Brad Lee, a Funny Papers employee.
"We get local artists in here a lot," Lee said. "They print their stuff themselves and distribute it to any store that will take it."
All the money Neely makes from his book sales goes back into the publishing costs, he said.
"I love what I do, and I love Creased," he said. "[But] up to this point, I'm still just a poor person. I can't even buy a taco with what I make."
But that doesn't really matter, Neely said.
"[Money's] no reason to do anything," he said. "People respond to Creased, people ask me to keep drawing it, so I can't stop. And you come up with ideas, and you have to do something with them, and they don't really work in any other format."
Most single-panel comics, like Ziggy or Family Circus, are nationally syndicated, running in daily papers across the nation, with a broad and sometimes conservative audience. Their content is necessarily bland, and originality is rare, Neely said.
So while sequential, story-oriented comics are experiencing a renaissance, single-panel and strip comics are often left behind.
Chris Ware's graphic novel "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001, marking the first time a graphic novel has won a major book award.
The same sort of experimentation and innovation isn't often seen in single-panel cartoons, Neely said.
"There are strict single-panel guidelines," he said. "That's why we'll have Garfield and Non Sequitur for ever and ever. No one puts money on the risk in syndication."
Then Neely starts to talk about song lyrics.
"When you think about song lyrics, the ones that are obvious, they're no good. The ones that are more subjective or poetic - for that, the lyricist gets credit for being a great artist. And basically, in the comics or cartoon arena, the humor is really stilted. Comics have always had to be one type of thing, and they've always been the type of lyric you understand," he said.
Another side-project explosion
As he prepares for the release of the new Creased Comics Collection, Neely will also be preparing for a tour of "Wizard People, Dear Readers," an unauthorized re-envisioning of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."
Neely recorded an alternative voice track for "Harry Potter" in which he, the narrator, assumes the grizzled voice of poet Steven Jesse Bernstein and comments on the movie.
It's sort of Mister Sinus Theater-meets-Dark Side Of The Rainbow, Neely said.
Neely originally intended the project only for his friends but it has since exploded, featured at the New York Underground Film Festival and other festivals in Brooklyn, Chicago and Seattle.
Like Creased, the "Wizard People, Dear Readers" project began as a casual diversion that has grown and grown, Neely said.
"It really evolved out of a bunch of people sitting around and saying, 'wouldn't it be funny?'" he said.
Warner Brothers is mildly concerned about copyright infringement, Neely said.
"It doesn't seem very legal, but I think I'm protected under certain gray areas. As long as I'm not making any money, it's okay," he said.
The "Harry Potter" project has increased Creased readership, Neely said.
"But you know, it's definitely not my intention to make something that I can sell and make a living off of. That's not my first intention when I sit down to do something ... A lot of my favorite stuff, my favorite movies and music, they're not on everybody's top 10 list. You have to seek that stuff out," he said. "And I'd rather be something you have to seek out, and be something interesting and engaging."
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