|
|
 |
Larry Marder is the creator of Tales of the Beanworld which was first released in 1985. He was born in Chicago in 1951 and educated at Hartford Art School, where he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1973. Marder spent almost twenty years in the advertising business as a Vice President/Creative Director in Chicago IL. He was Marketing Director for Moondog's Popular Culture Stores from 1990-93. From 1993-99, he was Executive Director of Image Comics in Fullerton CA. From 1999-2007, Marder was President of McFarlane Toys in Tempe AZ. Marder is currently Owner of Beanworld Press, Inc. He lives in Orange County, California with his wife, Cory, and their two cats--Olive and Chipper. Marder is a firm believer of Marcel Duchamp's observation that it is the viewer that makes the picture.
This interview was conducted via email in October 2009.
JON MATHEWSON: My 9-year old son enjoys the Beanworld stories. I asked him if he had any questions for you. He thought about it for a couple of seconds, and asked, "why did he write Beanworld?"
So let's start with that. What was your inspiration for Beanworld? And, my follow up question, how does that continue to inspire you a quarter of a century later?
LARRY MARDER: Over the years, I’ve become increasingly convinced that I didn’t create Beanworld, but in fact, Beanworld discovered ME. It was always there, just outside my perceptions, around the corner of my consciousness.
From the time in art school in 1972 when I decided to devote all my creative energy to bean-shaped characters, through the summer of 1975 when I settled in on the name “Beanworld; it always felt like I was in possession of something that was all wrapped up in layers and layers of problems to solve. I very much knew that the world already seemed to exist but I just wasn’t seeing it with clarity. I understood that it was my purpose in life to adventure out into the Great Unknown and discover Beanworld and bring its stories back and tell them like some old gent at the Royal Geographic Society centuries ago.
And, really that is what I did.
My old friends can tell you just how single-minded I often became regarding Beanworld. I had all these pieces, shards, slivers of this thing called Beanworld but I didn’t understand at all how it actually fit together. It was like having hundreds of pieces of a jig saw puzzle to put together, not knowing if I had all the pieces yet, and there was no box with a picture on it to follow.
The last major piece to be revealed was Gran’Ma’Pa in 1980. Everything fell into place then. And the stories just kept on coming.
And that is exactly what keeps me going to this day. I have always known a lot about certain things. Stuff like exactly who (or what) Mr. Spook is or what happens when winter arrives. Other things don’t get uncovered until the exact moment they are needed in the story telling.
To this day, when I sit down to work on Beanworld, I still very much feel like I am on a grand quest of discovery.
JM: The exploration, the art, the ideas keep coming for you. But how does an artist get their original creative work from the drawing board to an audience?
LARRY: In my case, rather slowly. Once I understood what a Beanworld comic book story was supposed could be; I started putting them down on paper. I had to work my way through some technical difficulties. Parts of The Legend of Pop! Pop! Pop! are rather rough around the edges.
The first draft of Pop! featured Hoi-Polloi with two arms and Boom’rs who looked a lot like the Blues Brothers.
I photocopied a bunch of them, for some reason the number eight sticks in my head. They were copied on one side and clasped together with a big ol’ silver paper clip. I brought them to the 1982 Chicago-Comic-Con. Because I’m a very shy person when it comes to Beanworld, I basically slid the envelope across the table at comics folks whose work I admired and ran away as fast as I could.
The one person I heard back from was Jim Shooter, who at the time was in his prime as the Editor–in–Chief at Marvel Comics. So getting back an enthusiastic, encouraging letter from him was a major signal for me to continue on the path I found myself on. Jim did say it needed some work and I set my sights on figuring out what was confusing or vague.
Over that winter, I discovered that the Hoi-Polloi should actually only have one arm. And they made much more sense to me that way. The Boom’rs appearance changed during a Stray Cats concert at the Aragon Ballroom. I just had a total revelation in the middle of the show and thought “The Boom’rs need rockabilly pompadours piled sky high!”
The other revelation I had was that if I keep handing out one sided photocopies of Beanworld held together with a paper clip it was going to seem more like a submission than what it actually was; which was just giving people in the business a look-see at what I was up to.
At the same time, the ad agency I was working at got this newfangled machine that made two-sided 11” x 17” copies. So, I decided to break up Beanworld into 8 page 8 ½” x 11” ‘zines. The first page of each little ‘zine was a splash page. It no longer looked like a submission at all. It looked like a small press effort, except at the time, the ‘zine movement hadn’t really established itself in Chicago quite yet.
So for the Chicago Comic-Con of ’83, I came up with a what I hoped was a good idea. I put all the ‘zine chapters that made up the entire story of Pop! Pop! Pop! into a manila envelope and stuck a homemade sticker on the outside that said “It’s Weird! It’s Cool! It’s Free!”
Inside I put a self-addressed stamped envelope with a little form to fill out that said something like “Hey, If you like this, send back the SASE and I’ll send you the next issue FREE!”
Today I can’t recall exactly how many I gave out. I got back two responses. One from Lee Marrs and one from catherine yronwode who was an editor at Eclipse and a columnist for CDG.
cat wrote a glowing review in CBG and encouraged people to send me money to get a copy. And they did. I got a lot of responses. Dozens. Pretty soon I had a mailing list of well over 100 people and I was still sending out free copies with SASEs. It was costing me a fortune but I was getting known within the bounds of the industry in 1983-1984.
In 1984, cat and Dean at Eclipse made me an offer that I took up to have my book distributed through Eclipse. For the time it was a rather unusual way of being published. I received no page rate. I paid for my own film. Eclipse solicited, manufactured, distributed, and collected the funds for Tales of the Beanworld. In exchange for these services Eclipse took a tiny fee, which was often paid off in service, I’d create advertising and marketing work for the company and sometimes they got like 5%. I owned everything. All the rights and all the inventory.
This essentially the same deal offered to creators when I was at the helm at Image Central a decade later.
In January 1985, Tales of the Beanworld, a most peculiar comic book experience, hit the comic book stores. It did amazingly well to everyone’s total surprise. And it found a small, dedicated readership from the get-go.
JM: And now, twenty-four years later, there are two hardcover compilations out, with a whole new 186-page story, Remember Here When You Are There! due out in December. Is there anything about the new story that sets it apart from the previous stories?
LARRY: Actually it's 212 pages of new story and art. The book was solicited before I finished it.
It’s the next Beanworld story. For any reader who started with the two hardcover books, cracking the cover on the new volume will seem quite seamless from previous reads. As far as the Beanworld characters are concerned, the plot picks up not so long the original Tales of the Beanworld series left off.
That said, overall, I think the ar work is tighter. Working digitally on a Wacom Cintiq tablet in Photoshop allowed me transcend the issues I was having so many of my favorite art supplies had seemingly gone extinct.
My lettering is far better than before. I hand-lettered all of “Here There!”on the Cintiq. I didn’t use or make a font, and as a result my lettering still looks handcrafted but it’s quite tight looking in a way my old lettering often was not.
Same thing with Zip-A-Tone Ben Day screen patterns. I found a manga oriented site on the Internet and learned how to make my own. I had a lot of fun experimenting in that area.
Jon Mathewson bought his first comic book, Walt Disney Movie Showcase #1 (featuring an adaptation of the movie "The Boatniks") in a general store in Bar Harbor, Maine in 1970. Soon after, he bought an issue of Tom & Jerry Comics, and tens of thousands after that. A widely published poet and historian, Jon manages the collections of a museum by day, and seeks out great comics by night. He is married with two children: a 9-year-old son who enjoys Ben 10 and Asterix, and a 5 year old daughter who was recently caught reading Owly. Jon thinks everyone should buy their comics through Panel to Panel.
interview © Jon Mathewson. Reprinted with Permission.
|
| This article was published on Thursday 12 November, 2009. |
|
| Current Reviews: 0 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
Products related to this article: |
 |
|
|
|
