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Professionally, I have considered Kazimir Strzepek an artist to watch for a while now: I gave his comedy-duo (and, with the inclusion of Gran, the mute anthropomorphic-cat roomie, trio) minicomic
Spaz: Our Collected Comics 2003-2005 an honorable mention in the 2005 Best of the Year issue of
The Comics Journal, and favorably reviewed "Endless Plains of Fortune," his collaboration with Mark Campos in
Moxie, My Sweet, in that same publication. In 2006, he garnered Ignatz and Eisner award nominations for
Mourning Star Vol. 1, a post-apocalyptic fantasy epic intermixed with too many genres to list: it's even difficult to pin down all of the different kinds of comedy in his graphic-novel debut, as it ranges from slapstick and potty jokes to the character-driven beats of road trip-and-buddy humor. No matter what his large cast of humanoid creatures (birdlike, hippolike, or
chibi Nosferatu) are doing — pining for a lost love, killing time, cooking a meal or dismembering — they are all well-served by Strzepek's formally inventive storytelling and distinctive, dexterous pen-work. The second volume of
Mourning Star, also published by boutique comics publisher Bodega, made its debut at MoCCA this year.
I spoke to Strzepek in person (in a coffee shop, game store and park, respectively) about videogames, listening to music in the bathroom and Chun Li sex fantasies, and was able to visit his home, where I photographed his drawing table and envied his toys (he has a classic arcade game in one corner of his apartment).
Hawaii
Though he was born in the Bay Area, Strzepek's parents "decided to pack up everything and move to Hawaii" when he was 5 years old. (His sister, younger by two years, eventually returned to the Bay Area.) Strzepek explained, "I read superhero comics and things like that when I was high school, when it was that big Image comics thing. I was into Marvel stuff previous to that, I liked Avengers and everything, just kind of lightly done. I got disinterested, in the chromium covers — it got washed out. I started getting more into animation and things like that."
Having developed an interest in anime, along with his friends, due to a Japanese television station that transmitted "home-subtitled" cartoons such as
Dragonball,
Crayon Shin-chan and
My Neighbor Totoro (back "when it was such a cultish thing. No one knew about it"), Strzepek entered a fledging animation program at the University of Hawaii. He found his classes to be insufficiently rigorous, although he allowed that "it got [him] going." When I asked if his studies helped him learn to convey movement, he replied, "It would probably come from Japanese manga …I'm not really too sure. My interest in animation is seeded in my work, now. When I draw I just do it for the story."
Strzepek summed up his art education thusly: "I just want to draw things that are fun to see and fun to do, and challenge myself. I hated drawing cars, I hated drawing buildings; in high school, it was the worst things ever. I 'fessed up and would draw nothing but cars and stuff like that just to try make myself … get my own way about things."
Spaz
Introduced to self-publishing by his girlfriend at the time, Strzepek attended a "local zine fest," where meeting up with fellow cartoonist Ken Dahl [
Welcome to the Dahlhouse] helped him to recognize "that he was doing art through that too. From there I realized I could express myself doing minicomics." At some point, he "learned more about Dan Clowes and Adrian Tomine and — the ones that everybody always mentions — Chester Brown. I jumped deeper and deeper into comics. In Hawaii, it was very limited what we would receive at bookstores. You couldn't get
King Kat or anything like that. No real minicomics were ever really sent over there for consignment."
Strzepek put out a comic zine anthology with two of his friends called
Project Masturbation ("a pun off of this comic cover from something in Hawaii") and, influenced by Johnny Ryan, began working on
Spaz.
Initially conceived for the school newspaper, Strzepek said that he realized "that they wouldn't carry it, it was too weird: so I made a minicomic out of it." Strzepek regarded
Spaz as an exercise for trying to develop character and learn how to do more personality-driven comics: the loose set-up (when straight-man Guts' best friend Booie moves in, he finds that Guts has already had to take another roommate to make ends meet, the humanoid cat Gran) allowed Strzepek to hone his dialogue skills by riffing on everything from j-horror to fun-sized candy bars to his generation's (both male and female)
erotic fixation on Street Fighter. In
Spaz, Strzepek evolved past
the kind of humor he would probably describe as "frat-ty" (that "Dane Cook, frat-ty penis joke, fart joke kind of thing"). While that type of subject matter remains in his work, the attitude behind the jokes has shifted: On his sense of humor, Strzepek provided that the "jokes aren't really ha-ha funny, like laugh out loud, it's just whimsical, kind of cute. […] I think my humor is goofy. I convey that with my characters."
Stzepek also experimented heavily with format and design: his
Spaz minicomics were "screenprinted Chick tracts, really thick, made with a special clamp with holes to drill the holes in so I could sew the covers shut." They got Jordan Crane's [
Non,
The Clouds Above] attention at the San Diego Comic-Con one year, and he began publishing some of Strzepek's comics on his Redink website. Strzepek reflected, "I always have ideas of bringing back the characters of
Spaz and doing something. Jordan asked me to bring them back for something, but I haven't had time."
"Endless Plains of Fortune"
Soon after Strzepek moved to Seattle — "I moved to the mainland to meet fellow artists and people to hang out and draw with" —he was introduced by David Lasky [
Boom Boom] to the Finecomix art collective, who were putting together a comics anthology of stories by Mark Campos. Though Campos originally had another story in mind for him, they settled on something else, a pantomime about a man who playfully tries to stave off loneliness. It was the first time Strzepek had ever worked on anyone else's script. "[Campos] gave me the panel layouts, just the descriptions. I changed a few little things. He was really fun to work with." Campos and Strzepek developed a "cutesy" protagonist. Strzepek described the floppy-eared, fanged creature as "like a combination of a
Mourning Star character and Gran ... striped shirt too, hunchbacked body." Another indicator of Strzepek's departure from the urban environment of
Spaz was
Endless Plains of Fortune's windswept landscape. It's a character in and of itself, given depth by his minute lines — it's possible to get a feel for the dimples in the topography, and appears to be a warm-up for the farmland, mountains and deserts of
Mourning Star.
NEXT WEEK: VIDEOGAMES, JUDD APATOW COMPARISONS AND
MOURNING STARAll art ©2009 Kazimir Strzepek
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
