Gordon McAlpin is someone I started a correspondence with during one of my periods of befriending Chicago cartoonists in search for a local collaborator for The Great American Graphic Novel.  Alas, he is not available to work with me but I have kept in touch with him and his comics.  When the opportunity arose for me to interview him, I pounced on it. 

 self-portrait,  © 2005–2008 Gordon McAlpin

Here’s his bio: “Gordon McAlpin lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as a freelance designer, production artist and illustrator. From 2004–2006, Gordon created Stripped Books, a series of non-fiction strips covering book- and comics-related events in comics form. Multiplex began in July 2005, and is Gordon’s first on-going comic strip.

Gordon also does a bit of freelance writing now and then, and, along with fellow movie webcartoonists Tom Brazelton (Theater Hopper) and Joe Dunn (Joe Loves Crappy Movies), co-hosts The Triple Feature Talkcast every Monday night at 9 pm Central Time.

You can e-mail Gordon at gordon <at> multiplexcomic <dot> com, unless you are a spammer.”

First question: MULTIPLEX has been described as having “real emotional weight” even though it’s primarily a movie geek humor strip.  Is there any particular set of influences or aspirations that guide your sensibility and style?

As far as influences go, I suppose South Park and The Office (both versions) are the two biggest, most direct influences on Multiplex. It think they’re all three absolutely brilliant comedies. South Park is known for being broad and lowbrow, but it’s also one of the smartest shows on the air — I love it when they get preachy. And both versions of The Office have astonishingly well-developed characters.

Archie is a pretty big influence on Multiplex, too, in a way. Jason is kind of Reggie, if you think about it. I’ve always felt that Reggie was way more interesting than Archie, because Archie has everything handed to him. He’s a jock, and he’s got two beautiful girls fighting over him that he can’t choose between — that’s his big problem in life. I can’t identify with that. Reggie, on the other hand, is a dick, so already I have something in common with him.

Some other influences of mine, although they may not be apparent from Multiplex or any of my other comics, are the early Peanuts strips, Calvin & Hobbes, Ivan Brunetti, Tintin, Joe Sacco’s work…

The unusual thing about Multiplex as it relates to me as a cartoonist is that it’s really not the sort of strip I ever pictured myself doing. When I was younger, I would wrote or even start drawing a lot of interminably self-indulgent “epic” stories about a bunch of kids (often myself and my friends) hanging out and goofing off, but I would never finish them. Eventually, I would decide that the scripts were awful and didn’t deserve to be finished (because they were and didn’t — and I’d stop working on it. It wasn’t until I started doing Stripped Books that I found my “calling”: non-fiction comics.

Considering far more people know me from reading Multiplex than Stripped Books, that might seem weird, but that’s really where my heart lies. As much as I like making stupid jokes, my real hope — someday — is to make my living doing comics that educate or enlighten, not just entertain. That’s why Multiplex has some elements of non-fiction in it, with all the movie commentary.

But even with the teen drama, I have ideas at play that I’m trying to work out. Jason and Becky are obviously set up to end up together, but how they get there — if they get there — and why is really what interests me about them. In my opinion, the only real substance fiction can have in it is insight into the human mind; beyond that, it’s just entertainment. Unless you have characters that feel like real people and have lives like real people — with all the ups and downs you would expect — then you’re just making up a bunch of nonsense.

Question no. 2: Other than its purpose as a funny sitcom/webcomic,  what do you want people to take from MULTIPLEX?

If people are going to take any life lessons from Multiplex, I suppose I’d like it to be, “Shut up during the goddamn movie. This isn’t your fucking living room.”

Wait, no, not really.

I don’t know! I guess one of the reasons I enjoy Multiplex is that with any given strip, the point of that strip (or that storyline) is really what I want to be saying. Sometimes I just want to make them laugh. Sometimes I want them to get them to think a little more critically about the movies they watch — or less critically, in some cases… Sometimes I just want to tell a sweet (or bittersweet) story about two kids in love. Or whatever.

Multiplex is like three strips in one: stupid jokes, movie commentary and teen drama. If my enthusiasm for one aspect of the strip wanes or I just don’t feel funny one week, I can just switch gears.

Question The Third: What appeals to you about publishing a comic online?

Well, one of the big things is that I can publish myself and there’s an extremely low overhead. Multiplex isn’t making me rich by any means, but my one Project Wonderful ad pays for the hosting, my internet access, and then a little extra. That’s pretty nice.

Also, because Multiplex is on the web, I can see a movie or read about a bit of movie news and post a comic about it as soon as I finish drawing it. You simply can’t do that with print; there’s too much lead time involved.

Getting almost immediate feedback from my readers is also great. They really help me keep my enthusiasm up for the comic, and sometimes they’ve helped me fine-tune strips that didn’t quite work. When you stare at a joke for six or eight hours, sometimes it’s hard to figure out if it’s working or not, especially if a script has gone through a dozen permutations since you started it.

For that matter, just the ability to revise a strip after it’s been published is another great thing about the web. I don’t always go back and fix things I don’t think worked very well or looked good; that’s kind of a waste of time, really, because you can just try to do it better the next time you do something similar. But dialogue tweaks and spelling or grammatical errors are easy enough fixes. There’s really no excuse for any webcomics to have typos.

Gordon McAlpin is available for interviews and freelance work through his website.

– Dale Lazarov, Da Comix Pimp.