People often assume that because I can draw, then I must have a complete knowledge of adjacent professions like animation, comics, or even fine art. I would imagine a lot of creative people get these cross platform presumptions. It makes sense and there’s certainly merit to such beliefs, but most of these neighboring pursuits require an entirely different education and skill set. An easier example is to look at someone who can draw and favors one medium like pen & ink with copic markers and assume they’re probably really adept in oil or acrylic paints. There’s a good chance they’ve dabbled or have a more in–depth understanding than someone without any creative inclinations, but it’s often a stretch.
Lazy Comics 21 and an insight to my love of drawing hotdogs.
Such presumptions aren’t just limited to outsiders. We’re all inclined to believe it of ourselves as well. Case–in–point, I believed with my whole heart that with the right attitude and set parameters, I could write and draw my own comic strip. At the time (the early aughts), I was heavily into more underground comic strips with Red Meat by Max Cannon being my absolute favorite. I loved the irreverent and dark humor, bizarre premises, and vintage style illustrations. My idea was to create an eccentric cast of characters that required little to no manipulation from week to week (to save on time and production) and let them grow out of control. And so I created the aptly named Lazy Comics.
Lazy Comics #40 and my biting satirical debut into politics.
The exercise did in fact strengthen my writing chops and even understanding of joke crafting, but to maintain a weekly strip—even with the burden of things like character development and story arcs mostly removed due to the strips nature—I eventually found the whole thing overwhelming. How do the pros do it!?
I’m not too terribly ashamed to admit I’m most proud of this one.
That was a question I left unanswered until recently. I’ve known Jay Fosgitt for awhile now and even had the opportunity to do a fun and thorough interview with him for ToughPigs back in 2015. Recently however, along with all his other amazing work, Jay Started regularly posting a new comic strip called Junk Drawer Comics which I absolutely adore (I even ended last weeks post with a tease from JDC!). I’m getting ahead of myself though, so first let me please introduce Jay.
Jay Fosgitt is an incredibly talented and accomplished artist and writer with a fun and fantastic style and sense of humor. He’s worked with tons of fan favorite properties like Sesame Street, My Little Pony, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Popeye, and Rugrats to name a very select few and for dozens of publishers and studios like Marvel, Dreamworks, Archie, and IDW—again, just to name a very select few. Jay has also written lots of successful comics as well like Bodie Troll, Dead Duck and Zombie Chick, Necronomicomics, and Little Green Men. These are not your typical characters! So how does writing storylines, dialogue, gags & jokes, and plot devices compare to illustrating? Jay says;
I think most artists would tell you they find writing to be more difficult. Writing always came as naturally to me as drawing, but I don't feel like I was a very good storyteller until after college, when I started creating my first comic books. All the character development, plot development, staging of scenes--it's not entirely different from creating through drawing. It's just exercising a different creating muscle. Whatever caused my breakthrough as a storyteller, it was a welcomed change in my creative approach.
My writing really started blossoming on my first graphic novel, Dead Duck. That's where I really got my "pun chops", and learned to tell a purely gag-based story effectively. Then on Bodie Troll, I learned to tell a story based off relationships and character development, and how to develop an ongoing narrative rather than just stand alone stories like I had in Dead Duck.
Your latest endeavors with Junk Drawer Comics comes across like a very liberating experience for you and I have a lot of questions about it, but first can you tell me how they came about?
Bodie Troll had been in various states of production and hiatus, before and through Covid. For the past three years, the bulk of my work had been for Disney publishing, and I was eager to get back to drawing something of my own again, and something outside of Bodie. I've had several ideas for different comics accumulate over the years, but felt I never had the time to put into developing them. That, and I had a lot of emotional issues, and really needed a new method for dealing with them. So, I decided I wanted to try and do a sort of Sunday comics format--a full comic page to tell a self contained story. And each entry would be a stand alone concept. Some would be gag based, others would be more character driven. I didn't have a title at first--I almost called it Hodge Podge Comics, and I think I had some irreverent poop joke title as a placeholder for awhile. But while driving around on errands, Junk Drawer Comics just came to mind. We all have a junk drawer in our homes, filled with random bric-a-brac (I think Bric-A-Brac was also considered for a title...?), which seemed fitting for this comic. The first installment turned out to be really therapeutic for me, dealing with a recent heartbreak in a very sketchy, symbolic way. All these installments have been therapeutic for me in some way, even if the strip isn't apparently biographical. The other opportunity the strip gave me was being able to play with these disparate comic concepts I'd been collecting. Most of them weren't grand enough to require a series or even a full graphic novel or comic issues. So having just one page to tell the stories made things much sharper and even more creative for me, I think. I've gotten to play in sci–fi, horror, 1950's counter culture, and just be as whimsical and adult and nonsensical as I wanted, without any constraints. The initial idea was to do one a day for a year, and I had a solid start, almost getting through January without stopping. But other work soon took precedence, and the strip had to be more sporadic. But it's still a priority for me, and I enjoy creating them whenever I can.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but these comics feel like the evolution and combination of all your previous years of experience. Is that accurate or would you say they’re simply just the next step in your career?
Whatever your most current creative work is would inevitably be a culmination of previous experience. It certainly pertains to my work in Junk Drawer. But I wouldn’t say it’s a conscious choice to combine all that I’ve learned in my art. I wouldn’t even look at it as a next step, necessarily. People need to learn to appreciate the moment, especially creatives. Too many are creating something, then thinking “I need to monetize this! I need to make a collection of this! I need to find a publisher! I need to build a fan base!” Junk Drawer was specifically made to be of the moment I create it in. A lot of it is improvised, or at least created with the loosest, shortest of preconceived outlines in mind. And it’s meant to satisfy my creative itch that other things I’d been working on in recent days just hadn’t been scratching. It doesn’t have to be my next big thing, or even the thing that defines me and my career. It’s a very fluid and personal creative endeavor, and whatever it is now, I’m happy with. The future doesn’t figure into that enjoyment.
I told you Junk Drawer Comics reminds me of underground comics like Max Canon’s Red Meat, Matt Groening’s Life In Hell, or even Zippy the Pinhead. When it comes to humor in writing comics, who are your influences?
I've got a few different influences on my writing for Junk Drawer Comics. Matt Groening's Life in Hell comics is indeed influential. The randomness of his characters mixed with relatable scenarios and often bleak hilarity is something I try to instill in the strip. Berke Breathed's Bloom County, and probably even more so, his follow up strip, Outland, were definitely models for the direction of the comic. Outland had the same social commentary as Bloom County, but with the weird whimsy of George Herriman's Krazy Kat (another creative influence on this and all my creations). Gary Larson's Far Side, in its dark humor and off beat approach to combining characters and situations was a biggie, too. I found myself deeply influenced by the humor of the 90's comedy troupe, Kids in the Hall, who were brilliant absurdist performers. Their sketches defied punchlines, predictable direction, and often ignored relatability, with still finding common threads in their comedic weirdness. Sci–fi from the 80's through modern day has proven a huge influence on the strip. Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, Sonny Liew's Malinky Robot, and David Fincher and Tim Miller's animated anthology Love, Death and Robots have inspired a lot of the futuristic tropes I've employed.
Side note: I love Love Death & Robots! It’s like modern day Liquid Television from MTV. I don’t understand how more people don’t know about it! Check it out on Netflix.
You mentioned earlier the original intent for JDC was to do one a day and that’s for a personal comic strip with your own implemented deadlines. When I tried making Lazy Comics, I felt I needed to write at least two dozen strips and have them all ready to go before I even started creating them, but even then those ideas dried up quicker than I expected and I wasn’t able to stay consistent. Is that a problem for you? And if so, how do you handle that?
Given the anthology nature of the strip, where there aren't any consistent themes, characters or story lines (with the odd exception for a few of the strips), I found it pretty easy to write a comic a day at first. I have so many random ideas at any given moment--ideas that wouldn't necessarily work in a large format comic, but would make a nice, quirky one shot--that inspiration was always within reach. One day I was telling my friend, "I could do a strip about anything. I could even...have a robot fighting a sandwich!" And that is literally how I came up with that particular strip (which has already birthed a follow up strip, and probably more to follow). Another time I was daydreaming about a fictitious argument, and I uttered "Oh yeah? Well you drink your own pee." From that, I wrote an entire strip of two guys arguing, with the pee line becoming the crux of the whole story. In those moments, almost any sort of characters or situation could be hung on that gag. So I decided to do a loose Wizard of Id type setting, with two dungeon guards yelling back and forth, which itself inspired the punchline of the unseen prisoner asking if he could have some pee. That's basically improv, a performing method that I've always enjoyed and employed, and how I come up with most of these strips. So far, writer's block has been avoided by just talking nonsense to myself, or taking note of my own idiosyncrasies.
So are most of your strips spontaneous like that? Or do you ever keep a list of ideas?
I've had some concepts collecting in my sketchbooks for a few years, but nothing too fleshed out or scripted. My Fuzzy Memories strip, for example. It's about a burned out puppeteer who hallucinates that his puppets are alive. I came up with that idea back in 2011, just before I started developing Bodie Troll. But Bodie quickly took precedence, and Fuzzy Memories got shelved, until I came up with Junk Drawer Comics eleven years later. There's other strips in the comic that have had long wait times as well. Once I started drawing JDC, I did keep a list on my phone of ideas that I could use as jumping off points for comics, but again, nothing too developed or scripted at the time.
In your opinion, what’s the biggest mistake a writer can make when creating comics?
I don't know about mistakes, but the one thing a comic writer should know is how to think like an artist. Comics is a visual medium first off, so no matter how brilliant you think your prose is, it is there to serve the art, not the other way around. So when you're writing a comic, it would be smart to have a sketch pad handy, and to rough out the page payout while seeing how your text will fit on the page. Does it obscure the art? Does it tell something that could be better shown through the art? Think about these things, and cobble together dummy pages this way for the most concise and economical writing style that will work fluidly within your art.
I think it’s safe to say Jay is in a league all his own, but everything he’s said is just great advice. I want to cram so much more of his Junk Drawer Comics in here, but your best bet is to absolutely follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok and see them for yourself! Check out his website as well: jayfosgitt.com
