Friday, January 25, 2008
Pete Von Sholly, "Capitol Hell" artist: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2
(Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Pete, in all of your comic and cartoon work, but most of all that I’ve seen, there’s some common thread that I think must date back to EC Comics. Were you an EC guy?
PETE VON SHOLLY: I was too young, really. I was born in 1950, and that’s a handy year to be born when it comes to remembering how old you were when things happened. But EC Comics were just ahead of me, but I had an older brother who had some so I was fortunate enough to get a glancing blow with those. But they were scary. That’s what I remember about them, especially Graham Ingels. When you’re a little kid, they’re terrifying. The first cartoonists that I knew about by name were Charles Adams and Dr. Seuss.
ANDELMAN: Ah. Very different.
VON SHOLLY: Yeah, but I loved both of them, and we had some Charles Adams books around the house. And I used to love Dr. Seuss, especially McElligot's Pool, which was in color which was kind of unusual. But those were real early influences. I didn’t really find out about EC Comics, to get back to your question, until much later when they started to reprint them.
ANDELMAN: Is it wrong to assume you’re a fan of horror comics.
VON SHOLLY: Oh no. I just didn’t grow up on those. There weren’t that many available to me, but the influence of EC Comics is so pervasive. I started, when Creepy came out, they had several of the EC artists, of course, in Eerie, the Warren Publications. So that was my EC Comics experience and in a way was sort of the second generation of those.
ANDELMAN: Dark Horse has published a number of collections of your work, which you kind of referenced earlier. They include Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid and Pete Von Sholly’s Extremely Weird Stories. Along that same line, are there any kind of inner demons you’d like to expose now on Mr. Media? Do you want to tell us any issues you’d like to tell us about?
VON SHOLLY: I like H.P. Lovecraft; I like horror stories. And I originally wanted to do Morbid as a horror magazine, and I couldn’t believe no one had used the name “Morbid” because they’ve got creepy, spooky, eerie, every ghastly, every word you can think of had been used to death but not morbid. But what happened is I started making these stories, and they didn’t want to be morbid all the time. They wanted to be funny so the thing kind of went its own way.
ANDELMAN: Are there more of them coming?
VON SHOLLY: I have more if somebody wants to publish them. I enjoy doing them. I did about 400 pages of stuff. I just get involved in a project and go barreling ahead with it whether I know it’s gonna get published or not. So I’ve got more material. Dark Horse, I don’t think they sold that well, to be honest. I think they sold okay, but times are a little tougher, and the comic book market is tough.
ANDELMAN: These books are somewhat different style than Capitol Hell. For example, I’m looking at Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid Two: Dead But Not Out!, and you’ve got this incredibly hideous creature with multiple heads. They’re all dead, but they’re alive, zombie-like, chasing after this rather buxom young lady in a bikini, a common thread also, and in the stories, you’ve got live actors responding to things in a very Hollywood-style, and you’ve drawn in, I guess. I wondered: are these drawn? Are these watercolored? What is the style?
VON SHOLLY: The monsters are sculptures. They’re three-dimensional sculptures. My wife is a fabulous sculptor, Andrea Von Sholly, and she’s sculpted a lot of them. We made some movies called Prehysteria, and she sculpted the dinosaurs for those, and she’s sculpted figures for the Scooby-Doo movies, for the monsters and all kinds of stuff, so she’s very handy to have around, to say the least. Also, I worked with another sculptor named Mike Jones, who has sculpted some things for me, so I would do drawings, and somebody would sculpt up a figure, and then I could light the sculpture and be careful to light it the same way I lit the people I was shooting so that when I composited them together, they’d appear as seamless as possible. But I wanted everything to be photographic so it would look like it was the same so it would fit together.
ANDELMAN: Wow. See, I had no idea, and I imagine most people don’t know, that, looking at these, these are sculptures. These are not hand-drawn. I’m very surprised.
VON SHOLLY: By the way, you notice that it’s named Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid and Pete Von Sholly’s Extremely Weird Stories. Vaughn Bode went to Syracuse, where I went to college, and he came to our college once and talked, and I met him, and some other cartoonist friends of mine met him, and he told us, “Always put your name on everything. Put it big, and put it where they can’t crop it out.”
ANDELMAN: That goes all the way back to the Will Eisner school. Eisner was famous for putting his name on stuff when he worked for the military. So guys left the Army, thousands and thousands of guys left the Army, if they saw his work on PS magazine, they knew “Will Eisner” because his name was on everything.
VON SHOLLY: It’s only smart. My earliest favorite comic book people were John Stanley and Carl Barks, but I didn’t know who they were.
ANDELMAN: Right.
VON SHOLLY: I thought “Marge” did Little Lulu and Tubby, and I thought Walt Disney did Uncle Scrooge because those were the names that you saw. So I guess kind of with Marvel is when they started to give people credit.
ANDELMAN: It was a big thing for Stan Lee, of course, who was putting people’s names on things, and then of course years later, well, kind of overlooking the names.
VON SHOLLY: Well, he made sure to get his name on it.
ANDELMAN: Yeah. I don’t want to pick on Stan.
VON SHOLLY: No. I think that with Stan and Jack and Ditko and everybody else, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, or whatever that expression is. It took those guys together to do what they did.
ANDELMAN: There was another element of these comics that was familiar to me, and it reminded me of the little photo funnies from the National Lampoon thirty years ago. Is that possibly an influence?
VON SHOLLY: It’s an influence, but so is Help! magazine. Terry Gilliam used to do fumettis. Fumetti is, of course, for people who don’t know, is when you use photographs with word balloons, like comics, and Terry Gilliam did some for Help! Magazine. One really funny story had John Cleese in it, way before Monty Python. So fumetti is nothing new. I thought I had actually invented something completely new when I did these stories, when I did Morbid, and I showed Sergio Aragones, and he went, “Ah, fumetti!” “Oh shit, that’s right, fumetti. I guess I didn’t invent this.” I thought I did, but I guess I didn’t. Remember, Robert Crumb did them in Weirdo?
ANDELMAN: Uh-huh.
VON SHOLLY: The fumettis that I had seen involved usually people would pose and take pictures and stick word balloons on them, so the degree of manipulation of the pieces is what’s different with what I do.
ANDELMAN: Right. Well, I always thought when National Lampoon did it in the ’70s it was just the way to sneak more topless women into the magazine.
VON SHOLLY: Nothing wrong with that.
ANDELMAN: I was always for that, and actually that brings me to another question. There are plenty of busty babes in your work, real live models, not hand-drawn. Where do you find them, and what do you tell them they’re going to be used for?
VON SHOLLY: You find them working at the 7-Eleven, in work situations, any casual social situation. It’s a casting sort of consideration, but many things can drive the creation of a story. But I just ask people, and you’d be surprised how many of them agree. First of all, I draw all the stories first, and so I’ve got pencil drawings of everything. So when I go and get you, Bob Andelman, to be in my story, I know the pictures I’m going to need, I know what the light source is, and outside of maybe two or three changes of costume if the story dictates that, I don’t need to take up a whole hell of a lot of your time. I can tell people, “I only need you for an hour or two. I’ll pay you a little bit if I have to,” and they think it sounds like fun. They think it sounds interesting, and you’d be surprised how many people are happy to do it just by the asking.
ANDELMAN: A few years ago, you also produced in a slightly different genre but related, monster magazine’s spoofs. Do I have this right? Is the full title Crazy, Hip, Groovy, Go-Go Way Out Monsters?
VON SHOLLY: It is. And you know, I put those words at the top of the logo. This was an imitation of crass commercialism in ’50s and ’60s monster magazines, Famous Monsters of Filmland being the prototype for all that. But when people were trying to sell to the kids, they’d write “Crazy!” “Groovy!” “Hip!” “Go! Go!” Way Out!” They’d just throw words like that at it. Old square people trying to sound cool. And I just slapped a bunch of those words up across the cover meaning that this was what the publisher would be trying to tell you. And John Morrow, the actual publisher in this case, said, well, why don’t we just call it that? I wanted to call it “Shitload of Monsters,” but he wouldn’t do that.
ANDELMAN: Wouldn’t go for that, huh?
VON SHOLLY: No, strangely enough.
ANDELMAN: And so these are still available from Twomorrow’s Publishing.
VON SHOLLY: Right.
ANDELMAN: How many of these were there?
VON SHOLLY: Just two.
ANDELMAN: Oh, there were just the two. Okay. They’re a take-off on the old Famous Monsters of Filmland and that whole type of thing, right?
VON SHOLLY: Yes. There was a whole barrage of magazines that tried to jump on that bandwagon, and this is sort of a lampoon of all of that. We make some jokes about Ray Harryhausen in it. I love Ray Harryhausen. He was a great inspiration to me so this is, hopefully, it’s all good natured and not taken in the wrong spirit by anybody. But you cannot do a magazine like that without having Forrey Ackerman and Ray Harryhausen in it and maybe Ray Bradbury, some of the people that were always in your face in those magazines.
ANDELMAN: I love the cover line of these, things like, “Stills that were too crummy for the studios,” “Ads and promos disguised as news,” “Boring stills of people standing around,” and of course, the thing that Jim Warren was famous for, endless ads for weird, cheap garbage you may never even get.
VON SHOLLY: It just all flowed naturally, you know. But I love those magazines. It sounds like I’m making fun of them, but I think anything can be ribbed.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
(Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Pete, in all of your comic and cartoon work, but most of all that I’ve seen, there’s some common thread that I think must date back to EC Comics. Were you an EC guy?
PETE VON SHOLLY: I was too young, really. I was born in 1950, and that’s a handy year to be born when it comes to remembering how old you were when things happened. But EC Comics were just ahead of me, but I had an older brother who had some so I was fortunate enough to get a glancing blow with those. But they were scary. That’s what I remember about them, especially Graham Ingels. When you’re a little kid, they’re terrifying. The first cartoonists that I knew about by name were Charles Adams and Dr. Seuss.
ANDELMAN: Ah. Very different.
VON SHOLLY: Yeah, but I loved both of them, and we had some Charles Adams books around the house. And I used to love Dr. Seuss, especially McElligot's Pool, which was in color which was kind of unusual. But those were real early influences. I didn’t really find out about EC Comics, to get back to your question, until much later when they started to reprint them.
ANDELMAN: Is it wrong to assume you’re a fan of horror comics.
VON SHOLLY: Oh no. I just didn’t grow up on those. There weren’t that many available to me, but the influence of EC Comics is so pervasive. I started, when Creepy came out, they had several of the EC artists, of course, in Eerie, the Warren Publications. So that was my EC Comics experience and in a way was sort of the second generation of those.
ANDELMAN: Dark Horse has published a number of collections of your work, which you kind of referenced earlier. They include Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid and Pete Von Sholly’s Extremely Weird Stories. Along that same line, are there any kind of inner demons you’d like to expose now on Mr. Media? Do you want to tell us any issues you’d like to tell us about?
VON SHOLLY: I like H.P. Lovecraft; I like horror stories. And I originally wanted to do Morbid as a horror magazine, and I couldn’t believe no one had used the name “Morbid” because they’ve got creepy, spooky, eerie, every ghastly, every word you can think of had been used to death but not morbid. But what happened is I started making these stories, and they didn’t want to be morbid all the time. They wanted to be funny so the thing kind of went its own way.
ANDELMAN: Are there more of them coming?
VON SHOLLY: I have more if somebody wants to publish them. I enjoy doing them. I did about 400 pages of stuff. I just get involved in a project and go barreling ahead with it whether I know it’s gonna get published or not. So I’ve got more material. Dark Horse, I don’t think they sold that well, to be honest. I think they sold okay, but times are a little tougher, and the comic book market is tough.
ANDELMAN: These books are somewhat different style than Capitol Hell. For example, I’m looking at Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid Two: Dead But Not Out!, and you’ve got this incredibly hideous creature with multiple heads. They’re all dead, but they’re alive, zombie-like, chasing after this rather buxom young lady in a bikini, a common thread also, and in the stories, you’ve got live actors responding to things in a very Hollywood-style, and you’ve drawn in, I guess. I wondered: are these drawn? Are these watercolored? What is the style?
VON SHOLLY: The monsters are sculptures. They’re three-dimensional sculptures. My wife is a fabulous sculptor, Andrea Von Sholly, and she’s sculpted a lot of them. We made some movies called Prehysteria, and she sculpted the dinosaurs for those, and she’s sculpted figures for the Scooby-Doo movies, for the monsters and all kinds of stuff, so she’s very handy to have around, to say the least. Also, I worked with another sculptor named Mike Jones, who has sculpted some things for me, so I would do drawings, and somebody would sculpt up a figure, and then I could light the sculpture and be careful to light it the same way I lit the people I was shooting so that when I composited them together, they’d appear as seamless as possible. But I wanted everything to be photographic so it would look like it was the same so it would fit together.
ANDELMAN: Wow. See, I had no idea, and I imagine most people don’t know, that, looking at these, these are sculptures. These are not hand-drawn. I’m very surprised.
VON SHOLLY: By the way, you notice that it’s named Pete Von Sholly’s Morbid and Pete Von Sholly’s Extremely Weird Stories. Vaughn Bode went to Syracuse, where I went to college, and he came to our college once and talked, and I met him, and some other cartoonist friends of mine met him, and he told us, “Always put your name on everything. Put it big, and put it where they can’t crop it out.”
ANDELMAN: That goes all the way back to the Will Eisner school. Eisner was famous for putting his name on stuff when he worked for the military. So guys left the Army, thousands and thousands of guys left the Army, if they saw his work on PS magazine, they knew “Will Eisner” because his name was on everything.
VON SHOLLY: It’s only smart. My earliest favorite comic book people were John Stanley and Carl Barks, but I didn’t know who they were.
ANDELMAN: Right.
VON SHOLLY: I thought “Marge” did Little Lulu and Tubby, and I thought Walt Disney did Uncle Scrooge because those were the names that you saw. So I guess kind of with Marvel is when they started to give people credit.
ANDELMAN: It was a big thing for Stan Lee, of course, who was putting people’s names on things, and then of course years later, well, kind of overlooking the names.
VON SHOLLY: Well, he made sure to get his name on it.
ANDELMAN: Yeah. I don’t want to pick on Stan.
VON SHOLLY: No. I think that with Stan and Jack and Ditko and everybody else, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, or whatever that expression is. It took those guys together to do what they did.
ANDELMAN: There was another element of these comics that was familiar to me, and it reminded me of the little photo funnies from the National Lampoon thirty years ago. Is that possibly an influence?
VON SHOLLY: It’s an influence, but so is Help! magazine. Terry Gilliam used to do fumettis. Fumetti is, of course, for people who don’t know, is when you use photographs with word balloons, like comics, and Terry Gilliam did some for Help! Magazine. One really funny story had John Cleese in it, way before Monty Python. So fumetti is nothing new. I thought I had actually invented something completely new when I did these stories, when I did Morbid, and I showed Sergio Aragones, and he went, “Ah, fumetti!” “Oh shit, that’s right, fumetti. I guess I didn’t invent this.” I thought I did, but I guess I didn’t. Remember, Robert Crumb did them in Weirdo?
ANDELMAN: Uh-huh.
VON SHOLLY: The fumettis that I had seen involved usually people would pose and take pictures and stick word balloons on them, so the degree of manipulation of the pieces is what’s different with what I do.
ANDELMAN: Right. Well, I always thought when National Lampoon did it in the ’70s it was just the way to sneak more topless women into the magazine.
VON SHOLLY: Nothing wrong with that.
ANDELMAN: I was always for that, and actually that brings me to another question. There are plenty of busty babes in your work, real live models, not hand-drawn. Where do you find them, and what do you tell them they’re going to be used for?
VON SHOLLY: You find them working at the 7-Eleven, in work situations, any casual social situation. It’s a casting sort of consideration, but many things can drive the creation of a story. But I just ask people, and you’d be surprised how many of them agree. First of all, I draw all the stories first, and so I’ve got pencil drawings of everything. So when I go and get you, Bob Andelman, to be in my story, I know the pictures I’m going to need, I know what the light source is, and outside of maybe two or three changes of costume if the story dictates that, I don’t need to take up a whole hell of a lot of your time. I can tell people, “I only need you for an hour or two. I’ll pay you a little bit if I have to,” and they think it sounds like fun. They think it sounds interesting, and you’d be surprised how many people are happy to do it just by the asking.
ANDELMAN: A few years ago, you also produced in a slightly different genre but related, monster magazine’s spoofs. Do I have this right? Is the full title Crazy, Hip, Groovy, Go-Go Way Out Monsters?
VON SHOLLY: It is. And you know, I put those words at the top of the logo. This was an imitation of crass commercialism in ’50s and ’60s monster magazines, Famous Monsters of Filmland being the prototype for all that. But when people were trying to sell to the kids, they’d write “Crazy!” “Groovy!” “Hip!” “Go! Go!” Way Out!” They’d just throw words like that at it. Old square people trying to sound cool. And I just slapped a bunch of those words up across the cover meaning that this was what the publisher would be trying to tell you. And John Morrow, the actual publisher in this case, said, well, why don’t we just call it that? I wanted to call it “Shitload of Monsters,” but he wouldn’t do that.
ANDELMAN: Wouldn’t go for that, huh?
VON SHOLLY: No, strangely enough.
ANDELMAN: And so these are still available from Twomorrow’s Publishing.
VON SHOLLY: Right.
ANDELMAN: How many of these were there?
VON SHOLLY: Just two.
ANDELMAN: Oh, there were just the two. Okay. They’re a take-off on the old Famous Monsters of Filmland and that whole type of thing, right?
VON SHOLLY: Yes. There was a whole barrage of magazines that tried to jump on that bandwagon, and this is sort of a lampoon of all of that. We make some jokes about Ray Harryhausen in it. I love Ray Harryhausen. He was a great inspiration to me so this is, hopefully, it’s all good natured and not taken in the wrong spirit by anybody. But you cannot do a magazine like that without having Forrey Ackerman and Ray Harryhausen in it and maybe Ray Bradbury, some of the people that were always in your face in those magazines.
ANDELMAN: I love the cover line of these, things like, “Stills that were too crummy for the studios,” “Ads and promos disguised as news,” “Boring stills of people standing around,” and of course, the thing that Jim Warren was famous for, endless ads for weird, cheap garbage you may never even get.
VON SHOLLY: It just all flowed naturally, you know. But I love those magazines. It sounds like I’m making fun of them, but I think anything can be ribbed.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: National Lampoon
¶ 10:35 AM
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