Red Meat Goes Gold: Max Cannon, Alt Comics’ Dorian Gray Preps For Z.A.-Day
By Dean Bonzani
6.3.05
Max Cannon is an alternative cartoonist’s cartoonist.
The first paperback collection of his weekly syndicated comic strip, “Red Meat”, featured a plug from Matt Groening (Simpsons, Futurama) and an introduction by Bill Griffith of “Zippy The Pinhead” fame. Seven years later, he’s put out his third collection, “Red Meat Gold,” with an intro by Stephen Thompson, section editor of The Onion’s A.V. Club, and author of “The Tenacity of the Cockroach : Conversations with Entertainment's Most Enduring Outsiders.” He’s good friends with Tom Tomorrow, whose comic, “This Modern Life,” was the most accurate view on both of the last presidential elections that you’re likely to find on the planet.
Red Meat Gold is out on the bookstands, ready for eager purchase. I spilled a vodka gimlet on my personal copy while interviewing Max Cannon by phone for nearly three hours, (much to the consternation of our respective wives) and found the book as absorbent as it was supremely entertaining and provocative.
The son of an Air Force B-52 bomber pilot (who inspired the duct sealant huffing, latex catsuit-wearing character, Ted Johnson), young Cannon was born in Hunstanton, England, at an undisclosed date, and attended ten different schools before making his home in Tucson, Arizona, where he got his degree from University of Arizona in Studio Arts.
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This is the truncated version of our conversation about career exorcists, mucus-drenched mutant Grizzly snot muppets, the eating of otters, marmosets, and organic foods (Max sticks to organic for the most part), super-villain Pacific island strongholds with custom-designed uni-tard logos and private parrot-and-monkey-pest-control-spraying helicopters, how the bulk of a dominatrix’ clientele consists of middle and upper management types who, after a hard day of dishing it out, like to hire someone to flog and diaper them, and the hot new snack food sensation that we conceptualized, consisting of spicy breaded, deep-fried chicken skin orbs with your choice of dipping sauce, called Chicken Skinners™.
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Max Cannon: When I went to college initially, I was in linguistics. I woke up and smelled the coffee on that one. I thought, “No way. Is this the way I’m going to spend the rest of my life, even though I was fascinated by language?” I promptly switched my major to Studio Arts. That was where my other talents lay. I was pursuing a career as a painter, but at the same time, to pay the rent, I was waiting tables and doing commercial art. On a lark, a friend of mine who was a cartoonist—publishing cartoons— said, “You should do a cartoon. I think you should do a cartoon.” He just kept bugging me about it, over and over, and finally, one day I said, “Okay. How hard can it be? I’ve read comic strips and comic books my whole life, and so I went ahead and started doing a cartoon. It quickly metamorphosed into the Red Meat concept that you see today.
Dean Bonzani: You have strict parameters that you work within, and you go crazy inside these limitations.
MC: That stems from conceptual art training. It’s like science— you set out with a precept, and you go about intending to prove it within a framework.
DB: Are you familiar with “Get Your War On”?
MC: I do a very different kind of thing.
DB: Two different concepts, but the whole notion of reining some elements in and keeping them quiet, like in David Lynch’s “The Angriest Dog In The World.”
MC: Yeah. In fact, that’s a real good example. It’s about the text; it’s about the images created by the words— not as much about the image. It’s not zany, really animated cartooning, which is a good thing in its own right. Not to put it down— I think that’s a really cool thing. But in this case, the case of Red Meat, there were two things; one, I wanted it to be text-based in terms of its impact, and secondly—it’s funny that you mentioned “Jaws”— it’s so much more powerful to make the reader imagine the images, to create the images in their own mind, rather than show them. It’s far more troubling—the pictures that dance about in your head as a reader— than anything I could draw.
DB: Like the difference between a book, and the movie version of a book.
MC: Yes. If you can stimulate people to imagine, it’s so much richer.
DB: How much of your week is devoted to putting out the next Red Meat?
MC: A full day.
DB: Your bravery inspires me.
MC: It’s not bravery, it’s fear of having to go back into the restaurant industry. It’s a great motivator.
DB: Do you have a regular rhythm of working on it?
MC: I’m not really a creature of habit. My daily schedule is pretty varied, so I don’t have…”On Tuesday, I shall have mashed potatoes and roast beef.” I’m not like a Phinneas Fogg character that has everything regimented. During any given day, I don’t know what is going to come up. Somebody might want a cover illustration or somebody wants me to work on a script project— then I have to do a bunch of appropriation for that. There are always fires to put out. The pipes could burst, and there goes my morning.
You’re syndicated, so you’re on a deadline.
Deadlines are a good thing. Without them, nothing would get done. If we didn’t have deadlines, we’d all be laying around rubbing our bellies, and they’d be filled with Eskimo Pies™ and Otter Pops™ and Drumsticks™. And Chicken Skinners™. We’d be rubbing our full bellies and giggling at re-runs of “Friends.” And you know what? Twenty-four hours a day, day or night, you can find re-runs of “Friends” on cable or satellite TV. Somebody should study this phenomenon. It’s televised comfort food. It’s not really nutritious, but it’s engineered to be familiar and comfortable and just tasty enough.
Red Meat is rife with scatological and biological interplay…
These are all the common, shared experiences that bind us together as human beings. This is the cross-cultural common ground. It’s what keeps us earthbound and related. And it’s funny. I don’t actually spend that much time defining it. I instinctively know what it is I’m going for. I leave that for the unnamed archivist out there, these obsessive historians and analyzers. I really honestly don’t think about it all that much, per se.
That would ruin the fun.
Yeah, it would ruin the fun. I have a lot of fun doing it.
You’ve been doing this for how many years?
Fifteen.
Have you ever looked back at your old stuff and said, “Hehehe. That’s really funny.”
Yes. Or I’ve looked back and said, “Wow. That was a mis-fire. Okay, I messed up there.” Every once in a while, I’ll be looking back through them, and I’ll see one that had a nugget of greatness, or there was just something about it that was good, but I didn’t quite get it, and I’ll rewrite it and make it work.
In a current Red Meat? Do you just adjust it a bit and reprise it?
Sort of, in a way. But it’s like the director’s cut.
Do you ever look back at some of them and think, “Oh, God. People actually read that. I gotta fix that.”
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Sometimes. Other times, I just say, “I’m going to let that go.” Everybody makes mistakes. You can’t hit the bull’s-eye 100% of the time. If you work at your craft, you can get better and better, and then most of the time you can do it. You always have to top your best work, as a writer or an artist. You want to keep going up. Every artist goes through a time where they think, “I’m a sham.”
“Who am I kidding?”
“Who am I kidding? I can’t believe people have been fooled by this.” You know, you might like back over your work and say, “Oh, hey! There’s a seed of greatness.” Or, “That really worked well. Okay, there’s something there.”
In the pantheon of writers, artists, philosophers— when Red Meat is factored in, who would you want to be standing next to? If you were standing in a line of the famous, waiting for a handshake or some sort of award, who would you be surprised to find yourself standing next to?
I’d be really surprised to find myself standing next to Justin Timberlake.
Would you keep your arms crossed?
I’d try to look as “street” as possible. He was a Mousekateer. They’re not playin’ around. They play for keeps. If I’m in that line, I want to be right between the frozen head of Walt Disney and on the other side of me…I’m just going to go with Frank Zappa.
Frank Zappa with a big bottle of scotch in one hand.
And a burnt weenie sandwich in the other.
You were training as a linguist. You must have retained a linguist’s sense of, or fascination with, the English language when you went down this career path. The alliteration— just the music of the language. You play words like a musician.
I think I have a facility for language. I read— I put away a couple of books a week. I’m not a big television watcher. I do love cinema.
Just saying “cinema” says it all. “I went to the ‘cinema’ today.”
I went to see a picture, a film. A moving picture show. I read a lot. Obviously, I like the written word a lot. It’s better than cake.
You put words together in certain combinations, like a code. It brings things to life. It makes things appear as if from nowhere. Who have you read that does this— and inspires you to do the same? As a reader, who have you read where you say, “What a crackerjack phrase!”
In recent times? I’d have to cite David Sedaris. An amazing writer. I mean, he’s an amazing humorist, but he’s an amazing writer. His stuff is so well crafted, it’s beyond belief. I absolutely love it.
What were you reading early on?
A lot of junk. A lot of crappy books, but I read all the supposed great literature, too. I love Flannery O’Connor. I love Charles Bukowski. It’s funny— when someone asks you a direct question like that, you think, “Who’s really favorite?”
Do you have a stack of books and magazines on your nightstand?
Yes. I have a rattan sort of box that’s about 15”x23” that’s filled with a waiting list of books, then on top of that I have a stack of maybe seven or eight books and magazines.
Lemme go look… (Radio drama-like footsteps and creaky door sound.)
That’s a great idea. It’s all empty Lunchables™ containers. And cigarette packs, crumpled up. The stack of books…here’s what I have. I have “American Nomads” by Richard Grant, the British travel writer. I have “Hostage To The Devil”— I picked that up at a yard sale. I have “Story” by Robert McKee. This is a stack.
We’re archeologists now.
The L.A. Weekly. I’ve got…okay, here we go…
We’re autopsy-ing your nightstand now.
We sure are. I’ve got “Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson. I’ve got “Dress Your Children In Corduroy And Denim” by Sedaris. I’ve got a science fiction compendium edited by George R.R. Martin.
Are we going in order, top to bottom?
Yep. The New York Times magazine…and…I’m trying to keep these all in order. I had a David Foster Wallace book here, but I put it back on the bookshelf. Just temporarily. I just moved some of them this morning…they travel around the house with me. “Prefab” by the editor of Dwell Magazine, on modern prefabricated housing…I’ve got Max Brooks’ “The Zombie Survival Guide.”
Is that surviving as a zombie?
Complete protection from the living dead. I recommend this to everybody.
If you have a deep-seated fear of having your brain consumed.
It goes over effective combat techniques, how to hide— where the best places to hide are in different terrains. Myths and realities about the undead, what to do when you’re on the defense, on the run, on the attack. History of recorded attacks— it’s indispensable.
Everybody should have it in their back pocket.
Absolutely.
If people don’t have time to go out and get the book, and they’re attacked by zombies right after they read this interview…Defense: A zombie bursts through the door as you’re about to check your email. What do you do?
First of all, you’ve got to keep your cool. If you’ve been prepared, you’ve got a machete. Rule Number One is: “Blades never need reloading, and they never jam.”
That’s so practical.
Yeah, very, very important.
Aim for the neck.
Yeah. If you’re prepared, you’re never surprised. I mean, if they get past your perimeter defense, you’ve already failed on Job One.
Keep a robust perimeter defense.
You know, a moat doesn’t maintain itself. A gasoline-filled moat does not fill itself up every morning.
…keep…moat…full. What else?
You’ve got to avoid “the bite” first of all.
You don’t want to become one of them.
You do want a range weapon of some kind, but if it gets up close and personal…
Machete.
…you really want a blade. You’re talking wet bone and tissue. The rule of thumb is: kill the brain, kill the ghoul. What’s your quickest route. With a machete, you can swing it and get some momentum on it. If you can remove the head from the body— the head can still bite, but it’s not mobile any more.
It’s off in the corner trying to bite you.
Yeah. I’ll tell you one thing you don’t use— you don’t use fire. They just keep coming, and they’re liable to catch you on fire, they’re liable to catch your drapes on fire…
Let me write this down: fire…is…messy. No…fire…on…zombies. You know, you’re the second person I’ve met who has a legitimate fear of zombies.
It’s not a fear. I mean, they don’t feel fear— why should I? I just want to be ready. If the zombie apocalypse happens, I just want to be ready, that’s all. I want to know that I’ve done everything I can to protect myself and my family. I gotta start thinking like a family man.
You’re a home owner, you’ve got trees that you’ve planted that you’re responsible for, and you’ve got zombies.
I’d recommend a shotgun for a guy like you. If you’re a little nervous, a little shaky— you haven’t gone up against the undead before— at close range, it’s a “can’t miss.” It’ll whittle a zombie head into kindlin’. They don’t feel pain.
Don’t stop to pity them.
No, they’re beyond pity. You have to keep in mind, that is NOT your Aunt Glenda any more. She’s a flesh eating ghoul. She’s a thing now.
She’s a non-Aunt now. You can go ahead and pump her full of hot bird-shot.
It’s like chopping up the rocking chair at that point. A piece of furniture that wants to eat your brain.
©2005 by Dean Bonzani. All Rights Reserved