MT Interview: Steve MacIsaac
by Shaenon
Steve MacIsaac’s Shirtlifter starts today on Modern Tales. MacIsaac’s comics about gay life and love previously appeared on AdultWebComics.com, the Modern Tales family site for adult-oriented comics. He was kind enough to talk to me about his plans for Shirtlifter.
Shaenon Garrity: How did you get started as a cartoonist?
Steve MacIsaac: The way most cartoonists do–drawing on my parents’ walls.
In terms of actually getting published, in 2002, a couple years after my interest in drawing and comics got rekindled, I started submitting short pieces to different anthologies and ‘zines and posting whatever I managed to come up with on my website. While I was working on these stories, which tended to be very much rooted in personal experience, I was also working on Sticky, an erotic series I did in collaboration with Dale Lazarov. I completed a couple of stories before starting to look for a publisher; after seeing the first issue, Eros Comix committed to a three-issue series.
Eros liked the book and initially wanted to expand into more gay male titles but didn’t really know what to do with the book. They didn’t know how to get it into gay bookstores, and the direct market wasn’t exactly breaking down the door. So we did a collection of the three issue with Bruno Gmuender, a German publisher that specializes in queer art books and has pretty great penetration–they were able to get it into pretty much every gay bookstore in the world, so the hardcover did much better than the individual issues did. Dale’s just released his second book of material with them, actually, and if I ever decide to do a more straightforwardly erotic book I’d definitely talk to them about doing it.
After doing Sticky I wanted to focus more on my more personal work, the stuff that I both write and draw. After moving back to North America from Japan, I started self-publishing because my current work is in this sort of liminal zone–too tame to be porn, too explicit to be “literary” or “art” comics–which I’ve been told on both ends of the equation limits my potential audience. I figure if I’m only going to sell one or two thousand copies of something, I’d get better returns publishing it myself.
SG: What are some of your artistic influences?
SMI: While I don’t know about direct influence–I try not to crib individual cartoonists’ specific drawing or problem-solving strategies directly–cartoonists who I respect and admire, and who therefore are most likely to bubble through into my comics include Alison Bechdel, Eddie Campbell, Milton Caniff, Howard Chaykin, Dan Clowes, Chester Gould, Herge, Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Dylan Horrocks, Ralf Konig, Jason Lutes, Fabrice Neaud, Munoz and Sampayo, Hugo Pratt, Joe Sacco, Charles Schulz, Dave Sim, Art Spiegelman, Joost Swarte, Maurice Vellekoop, Chris Ware. There’s even more people in the mix if I think specifically about writing only, or art only, but the above people are kind of what I think of as making work in which those two elements are in balance.
If you want to get into directors, writers and artists outside comics I can do so but it’ll make this a lot longer!
SG: Your comic Roughs is just ending on AdultWebComics.com. What can you tell us about it?
SMI: It’s basically served two functions in the past couple years. It’s both an opportunity to revise and color older, out-of-print work (which was then subsequently printed in the print comic Shirtlifter #2), and a place to serialize the first draft of my current graphic novel, Unpacking. I really need deadlines in order to get things done, so having to ensure that something is up three times per week has spurred me to produce more than I ever would otherwise.
In the first case, I was working out final versions of older material, essentially readying them for print. But in the second it’s almost the opposite: Unpacking is very much a first draft, and what sees print will be fairly significantly different. The basic plot points won’t change so much, but a lot of things that were confusing when I was serializing it get straightened out in the print version, as I bring in more background and contenxt. so sometimes things can be a bit confusing.
Before starting Unpacking, I had never in my life drawn a story by beginning on page one and then drawing all the way through, chronologically, to the end. I’m more used to working on all the pages simultaneously, adding and deleting pages and panels as needed. So I’ve needed to adjust my work habits somewhat, and I’ve had a few growing pains, such as characters appearing, disappearing, and transforming. These kinks get worked out for the print version, which I consider to be the final, definitive version. I still very much think in print terms.
SG: What are your plans for Unpacking in the future?
SMI: Well, since I will be serializing the second and third volumes of Unpacking here at Modern Tales beginning in January, I most definitely have plans to continue with it. This is the longest story I’ve ever done, and it seems to keeps growing. As each volume is completed, it will be revised and published in the print version of Shirtlifter, with the aim of eventually collecting all three parts into a graphic novel.
SG: What made you decide to move from AdultWebComics to Modern Tales?
SMI: There were a number of different influences, but mostly it was because Roughs wound up serving a very different purpose than I had originally intended. When I started over at AWC, my initial idea was that it would be a place where I could continue to work on more erotically charged material, in addition to the more character-based material that I focus on with Shirtlifter. However, ambitions aside, the truth is that I have a limited amount of time to work on comics, and because I tend to only produce effectively if I have a deadline, I really didn’t have time to work on two different bodies of work. So my interests in the personal and the sexual winded up more or less merging in this story, in which the erotic connection between two characters is central to the conflict at its root.
Having established that erotic connection, the story as I’ve worked it out moves further and further away from it, to the point where being on an adult-only site would be completely misleading, and only serve to annoy the people who are really looking for a straight-up fuck book. So when I was looking for a home, I wanted to be on a site that reached a wider, more general audience, and one that had a diversity of styles and approaches. Modern Tales seems to fit that in spades, and, since the infrastructure and interface is basically the same as AdultWebComics, I thought the move would be a good fit.
SG: Can we expect to see other stories besides Unpacking in Shirtlifter?
SMI: I’m going to start with a story called “Unmade Beds”, a story from Shirtlifter #1 from 2006. I just sold out of the print run on that first issue, so this will be the only place new people are going to be able to see it for a while. I’m revising it slightly, but mostly the changes have to do with reinking and coloring the story, plus fixing a few things things with the original that I was never happy with. If/when I am able to reprint the comic it will be with this revised
version, a “second edition” as it were.
After that I will begin serializing the second volume of Unpacking, which will probably take about a year to get out.
There might also be some short, short pieces in there as well. Working on longform things has whetted my appetite for small pieces that don’t take three years to do.
SG: You’ve also worked on a lot of print comics. Of your work that’s been published in print, what’s your favorite?
SMI: My favorite story is always the one I am working on. My least favorite story is always the one I’ve just finished. I know that sounds flippant, but it’s true. I find it hard to reread stuff immediately without wincing–it takes time for me to get distance from the work.
That said, there are two pieces which I think have worked particularly well, and both of them are from Shirtlifter #2. The first is “Safe”, just because I think it successfully deals with a thorny and controversial issue for gay men in a complex and non-judgmental way. I’m also happy with “You Do The Math” because I think it’s the first time I’ve been able to incorporate real humor into my comics, which have tended to be rather dour.
SG: What else are you working on these days?
SMI: I have a new piece in the new Boy Trouble called “Ex-Communication”, which I did in collaboration with my husband.
I’m just finishing up the revisions to “Unpacking” that will appear in Shirtlifter #3: adding about 10 pages of material, significantly altering the chronology and structure of the story, altering the design of several characters, changing around a lot of dialogue. That’s taken up a LOT of my time for the past several months. I really do treat the online versions of my stories as first drafts.
When I finish that up, I will begin work on Unpacking Volume Two, as well as finishing reinking and coloring “Unmade Beds.”
