Peter Kuper, "Stop Forgetting to Remember," graphic novelist: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

I think the reason that many people who never read comic books find themselves drawn to graphic novels isn’t because they come in hard cover or because they cost more or because they’re hip at the moment.

I think it’s because we’re more likely to find little pieces of ourselves in the stories, which are often more autobiographical than Spider-Man or Green Lantern could ever be.

At least that’s the thought I kept returning to as I read through Peter Kuper’s latest graphic novel, Stop Forgetting to Remember.

The youthful sexual frustration, the aimlessness, the side comments to no one in particular, the social doubts, the eagerness/anxiety over fatherhood, the pain of maintaining an adult friendship -- there were so many things that could have been ripped from my own life that I couldn’t put the book down.

Kuper, whose previous graphic novels include Sticks and Stones, The System, and an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, is perhaps most widely recognized as the artist behind Mad magazine’s legendary “Spy vs. Spy” these days. And his strip The Virgin was optioned by HBO as well as actor Forrest Whitaker’s production company.

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Peter, your book is technically the autobiography of Walter Kurtz, but where does he end and you begin?

PETER KUPER: They sort of segway into one another. I think of it as being an auto-lie-ography. It gave me enough room to when I wanted to change the story and have whatever happen serve the story instead of being stuck with the facts if it were an absolute auto-memoir, but it gets very blurry, and I recognized much of myself in him, and we joined together in our coming of middle age story.

ANDELMAN: What would be an example of a Peter Kuper fact or a Walter exaggeration?

KUPER: Well, I have a friend in Missouri who I meet during the story, and he is another father, and in reality, it’s somebody I knew for a while, and I gave him all the lines that I would have wanted to say but then overlaid his personality on it. I keep the characters narrow so I wouldn’t keep adding on new characters. I might fuse two people together into one. Generally speaking, he and I share a great deal in common, including birthdays.







ANDELMAN: And what about on the family side? You have your parents there early on and then your wife and daughter.

KUPER: It’s all pretty much, all those things sort of line up, and at one point, I was having a fight with my wife, and I had just come back from at my studio working on that section of the book where I was drawing a fight with my wife -- it would be Walter’s wife -- and I thought, wow, the dialogue is perfect. I got it exactly right. I was having that dual thought while I felt like I was Walter and myself simultaneously with my stand-in wife, Sandra, and my real wife, Betty.

ANDELMAN: And what does your real wife think of being portrayed in the book?

KUPER: She gets final edit on her panels, so there were the occasions where she said, “You made me too fat here.” I said, “I’m trying to demonstrate that there’s a...” Okay, I’ll make you thinner. But overall, she gave me the big thumbs up, as did many of my friends, although I did find in the end I had friends who were angry with me for not putting them in the book and friends who were angry with me for putting them in the book, so I figured I must be doing something right.

ANDELMAN: Now, your wife also had the opportunity to put up a hand at one point when you are in the bedroom and said, “No, no.”

KUPER: That’s the edit on the panels.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Now, did you put that in, or did she suggest that you put that in?

KUPER: No. If it’s in there…. No, she didn’t pressure me per se. It was more like my general knowledge of what would pass with her, and I figured that was the line that she wouldn’t want me to cross, which is, demonstrating various sexual positions.

ANDELMAN: Monday through Sunday.

KUPER: That I can do with… Old girlfriends, it’s a different story, but the one I’m still married to, little different.







ANDELMAN: I see, I see. And what about your daughter? You have a daughter, I assume?

KUPER: I do. There was the difficulty of having what I could show her in the book because it does get into some territory I don’t want her to see. She was nine when I was working on the book, so I could show her sections that she appeared in. She had sort of a general idea of what’s going on there. But curiously, as I was working on the story, certain events took place that I was able to fold into the story, and it helped me figure out parts of it. For example, at one point, I went to kiss her, and she didn’t want me to kiss her goodbye. That was a perfect, emblematic moment in time, and it happened right when I was coming up on that part of the book where I would be looking for something that demonstrated how she’s growing up. That actually happened, also, when I was working on the wordless book, Sticks and Stones, because I was looking for something that would be a connector between a mother and son, and at that moment in time, my daughter was learning how to whistle. I was like, “Ah, there you go, that’ll work perfectly.” So occasionally, these things kind of line up and offer up the next step in the story that you’re trying to figure out.

ANDELMAN: How old is your daughter now?

KUPER: She’s ten.

ANDELMAN: Oh, okay, so this doesn’t go back that far.

KUPER: No, no, I was working on it right up until the time that we… Well, I was working on it even down here in Mexico, where I’m speaking to you from.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Well, this is where I was confused. How long did this book take you to produce?

KUPER: The earliest stories in there I did as far back as 13 years ago, and I had started on different parts of this at different points in time, but I certainly didn’t work on it non-stop for 13 years. I worked on it very, like my hard drive to finish the book took about a year and a half, but I had been working on sections of it over the years, and then as it came together, then I used parts of different stories that I had done before that all folded into a bigger picture.

ANDELMAN: I wanted to get a sense of that, because I finished reading the book, and I thought, this must have been done over a period of years. It seemed like early on that the narrator is more present than he is later in the book.

KUPER: Uh-huh. It’s a story within a story, so I’m working on the graphic novel itself, and these jump-backs in the past, a lot of them were actually about as I was coming up on parenthood. There’s kind of a line in the book where I go from not being a parent to having a kid, and in that first part of the book, there is a lot more of that memory and going back and looking at the past experiences trying to lose my virginity, various drug experiences, and bad old relationships. That slows down after I have the child. I’m not doing as much reflecting on my whole life there as dealing with having a child.

ANDELMAN: And it also seemed, in terms of the art, it seemed a little less frenetic as things wore on. It was fascinating in the early part of the book, that pre-marriage, pre-child part where there was so much going on. It seems like there was so much packed into all the panels, but part of that, of course, is the drug use relationship and…

KUPER: I was addled at the time.

ANDELMAN: Yeah. And the pursuit of sex because you’re saying one thing, you’re thinking another thing, and a third thing is happening. It was really interesting. Do you feel any hesitation at revealing so much of yourself?

KUPER: Absolutely. That’s part of why I have an alter-ego there. It’s for deniability purposes. Some of it is that once you kind of put your toe in the water, I mean at least in my experience, progressively it kind of started opening new doors, and that would lead to something else that was another step in being revealing. Once I kind of got far enough in there, then I felt less inhibited about doing that. I just find that I’m sort of trying to get at some kind of truth, whatever that is, and that the more I do something where I feel like, oh, this is so embarrassing and do I really want to go here, I think the odds are pretty good that I’m in the right territory for stumbling upon something that has some value to it.

And what’s also kind of curious is that when people have seen these stories, things that I think of as being most private and embarrassing and I was the only person this happened to, are the ones that invariably turn out to be universals, where many people say, “Oh yeah, that’s exactly what happened to me. Yeah, I lied about saying I wasn’t a virgin any more,” or a million things. But that’s part of the idea, getting at this kind of truth that I feel there is so much covered up and not talked about that it’s a way that you can make stories like this have some actual import, be useful beyond just doing it for myself.







ANDELMAN: What can I say about it without giving it away, the section with Walter, your alter-ego, and Vickie and Keith? That came to a conclusion that I did not see coming. I don’t want to give that away, because I really think people should read that and not see that coming, but if that was even close to reality, that was an extremely close…

KUPER: Close encounter of the third kind.

ANDELMAN: Close encounter, yeah. I mean, that was different. Did that one give you any pause in terms of sharing that? You could have skipped over that part had you chosen to.

KUPER: Yeah, absolutely. Lots of pause, lots of shaking, nervousness, like what’s going to happen, why have I done this? I generally think that the artist has no idea, and you see explanations for why people do things and that they’re explanations, but they don’t necessarily cover it all. And there’s a lot of things that I’ve done with the stories or certain stories that I’m telling that I’m not wholly sure why I’m letting loose on something. On the other hand, there’s a lot of great guideposts and people who’ve been influences, like R. Crumb, who sort of represents the “let it all hang out and take your chances with that.” And you know, relative to some of the things that he talks about, I’m just putting my toe in the water. But it was this kind of, I have these stories that I’m interested in telling, and they have so many different facets to them that I just thought, “That would just make such a good story. Why would I not want to tell it?” And now when the book comes out, then I’ll see what the payoff actually is, as I'm chased down the street by a crowd.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.