UNTAPPED TALENT: FAREL DALRYMPLE

IF THERE'S A SMALL PRESS EXPO OR CONVENTION IN YOUR TOWN, CHANCES ARE THIS CAT WILL BE THERE. HIS NAME IS FAREL DALRYMPLE, AND HE MAKES COMICS THAT DON'T INVOLVE MUSCLEHEADS IN LEOTARDS. TASTES LIKE CHICKEN'S DEBBIE DISCUSSES JOHN HUGHES, DEAD ART FORMS AND DOG LIPS WITH LAST YEAR'S XERIC GRANT RECIPIENT.
debbie: What were you doing right before I called?
Farel: I was playing on the web. I was going to a site called makeoutclub.com. Have you ever seen that?
d: Uh, no. Never.
F: It’s pretty cool. I guess it’s like a personals place for all these indie and hardcore kids. Me and my friends go in there and look at all the young people and see what they’re doing.
d: To see what’s up with the “in” crowd?
F: Yeah. All the young girls.
d: (laughs) So, you just got back from the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco. How was it?
F: It was pretty good. We didn’t make a lot of money. We didn’t have the sales that we had at the one in Maryland, but I got a lot of good feedback. A lot of people were interested in what I was doing. I had some people coming up and they really liked Pop Gun War. One girl actually thanked me for making it.
d: Were other comic cats from the industry coming up to you as well?
F: Yeah. Some of the guys from Oni Press came over to the table and talked to me. I went over to their table and met Jim Mahfood and Scott Morse and a couple of the other guys who seemed interested in what I was doing. I was kind of excited about it.
d: Are you going to be doing any more appearances on the small press convention circuit?
F: Yeah. I’m going to go to the S.P.A.C.E. Con in Ohio. I think I’m going to put a lot more effort into a booth, because the spot I had at the Alternative Press Expo (A.P.E.) wasn’t very good. Some of the other publishers go all out. They get these big banners and make it look all cool. I’d like to put more time and money into making a booth. Not that I’m going to see a return on my investment, necessarily. I just want people to come over and see what we’re doing.
d: You could skip the whole booth thing and just get someone with a bullhorn to yell about your comics at these conventions.
F: (laughs) I guess the idea is to attract people and not turn them away.
d: Was there a definite point when you realized that comics were what you wanted to do?
F: I guess it was always sort of a childhood fantasy. As a little kid I always wanted to draw superheros. I read a lot of comics, so that was what I thought I would do. But then, when I got older, I got away from that. I was thinking of becoming a fine artist. Then, about halfway through art school I realized, “Wait! I really want to draw comic books.” I guess there was a turning point during my junior and senior years in college.
d: While you were pursuing becoming a fine artist, were you still working on comics in your spare time?
F: Sort of. I mean, when I was a teenager I would make comics in a spiral notebook. I’d just fill the whole thing with an action adventure story. I stopped doing that and would just draw in my sketchbook a lot.
d: What was the first comic you ever read?
F: I don’t remember specifically the first comic I ever read. I had some friends that were into comics. I ended up just reading their stuff. The first comics I remember actually buying were these Christian comics by this company called Spire. They had Bible stories told in different times. They had an Adam and Eve story that was supposed to be in space. I remember reading those because I was a church kid. Later on, I really got into collecting comics when G.I. Joe came out.
d: Do you have any favorite characters from the old Joe comics?
F: Roadblock was my favorite for a while. I just thought he was so tough, because he could lift a 50-caliber machine gun. But he was a cook, too, so he had a sensitive side. He always got really cool lines. I wasn’t as much of a fan of the cartoon. The way they portrayed him in the cartoon was a lot more stereotypical. He had to rhyme everything. In the comics he was cooler. They always have to dumb things down for television. That’s really sad when you have to dumb things down from comic books.
d: I don’t know. Friends is pretty intellectual.
F: Yeah. They all live in huge apartments in Manhattan and work at coffee shops. I’m like, “How’s that done?”
d: Speaking of mass media crap, most of the entertainment in the world is 10% plot, 90% glitz, and people just eat it up. Does that ever piss you off?
F: Yeah. It really does, actually. Probably too much, though. I don’t really watch television much at home, but when I was at the A.P.E. we had cable TV in the hotel room. I got really irritated by MTV. But for some reason, I couldn’t stop watching it. It irritates me that people are willing to pay money and worship these people. It just seems completely retarded.
d: Most underground cartoonists agree that even though superhero comics have their place, they’re kind of played out. What’s your opinion of them?
F: I don’t read them anymore. They’re not interesting to me. I think it’s just a matter of taste. Not that my taste is better. I think there’s a small place in my heart for them as something that I liked as a kid. But the ones they have now aren’t really interesting to me at all. It probably was always just as bad as it is now. It’s just that I got older.
d: Plus, even if you go back and read any comics from your childhood, you’re kind of jaded because those books were a part of you growing up.
F: Right. You’re nostalgic about it. That’s probably the reason I like half the movies I like. It’s just because I watched them as a little kid. I think there’s no one that can make teen movies as well as John Hughes did. That’s just my opinion. Maybe some of the movies today are just as good as the ones that he did. But I won’t like them as much, obviously, because they don’t speak to me the way John Hughes did when I was at that age.
d: What do you think of Kevin Smith movies then? I mean, he was basically trying to make the ultimate John Hughes film with Mallrats.
F: I think of Kevin Smith as a guilty pleasure. The movies that I’ve seen of his are very entertaining to me. Hopefully this doesn’t get back to him, but I don’t necessarily think they’re great art. Mallrats is really fun. I think he’s really good at dialogue. But, as far as me holding it in the same regard as Sixteen Candles or Pretty In Pink, probably not.
d: When we spoke before, you mentioned that film has been a big influence on you.
F: Yeah. I guess that’s where I draw most of my creative ideas from-- watching movies. Orson Welles and David Lynch have really had a profound impact on me as a creator. I’m going back and watching movies I should have watched when I was young. I watched a lot of movies growing up, but I’m trying to limit it more now to watching the right kinds of movies. Every once and a while I’ll throw in one of those guilty pleasures.
d: Do you think film is advancing in ways that comics aren’t?
F: I think you’re asking the wrong person. I don’t know. Comics are more limited in what you can do with them. Just the very nature of them is a completely visual thing. You can just do more with movies. That’s why they have more of a mass appeal. Comics are sort of becoming a dying medium.
d: Do you think anything will happen to stop the “comic death syndrome?”
F: Well my opinion of it for the last couple years is that it’s just going to become a niche market.
d: No!
F: (laughs) It might not get any worse than it is now, but I think it’ll change. I don’t know if the superhero thing will be doing as well as it is proportionately. As bad as the business is right now, there’s a lot of really good creators coming up. A lot of people are doing comics knowing that they’re not going to make any money at it. They’re just doing it for the love of comics, and I think that’s really cool. I think it will always survive to some degree. It’s nice to have something that you can hold in your hand that’s been made and crafted. They’re saying that the Internet is taking a lot of comic readers away. But I don’t think they’re taking away the right kind of readers. It might be becoming a smaller business, but that might be a good thing.
d: What’s your opinion of the underground comic community? Do you see it as a family or as a den full of competition?
F: Everyone seems to get along pretty well. Here in New York there’s a huge comic community. I know a few of them peripherally. I don’t really hang out with most of them. But it’s kind of cool. You go to a party and see all these guys hanging out together whose work you’ve seen. It seems like everyone’s really into helping each other out, promoting each other’s stuff, and hanging out. I don’t know if I would say it’s a family.
d: There are some very linear aspects in Pop Gun War and your short stories. But there’s also a ton of abstraction going on. Where in you does that come from?
F: It might be from movies that I’ve watched or books that I’ve read. I think David Lynch is good at that. Most of it just comes out of the way I work with my method of creating a comic book story. I usually get ideas for characters or specific scenes and write them down in my sketchbook. Later, I try to piece them together to form a cohesive plot. Then I just start drawing a comic from there. I put the dialogue in as I’m going. I’m not the kind of guy that sits down and says, “I’m gonna write a story.” I’ve never been good at that.
d: Since you don’t have an editor or publisher to please, you’ve got the ultimate creative freedom.
F: Well, yeah. I never went forward with it and thought, “How can I make this marketable?” or, “I wonder if publishers will like this.” I’m self-publishing, so fuck them. I can do whatever I want.
d: Hell yeah!
F: Even if people do or don’t buy it, I never did it with the intention of making money. It was more something like, “Hey, everyone. Look what I did. This is me. I put my heart and soul into this.” But, as it turns out, Pop Gun War is pretty marketable anyway. I’m not against making money.
d: Even though you self-print your book, are you at all interested in getting it published through another comic label?
F: I don’t think I would have a problem with that. That actually seems like a good idea, because self-publishing is about time and energy. It’s not just about drawing and writing. It’s about trying to promote it and sending copies out to people and trying to get distributed and going to conventions. If someone wants to take over the publishing reigns of Pop Gun War, that’d be pretty cool.
d: That would be cool. But if it doesn’t get picked up, you’ll still keep going with it?
F: Yeah. I plan on doing at least five issues. Then I’m going to approach another publisher with the completed work and try to get a full color version of it done. That’s my goal.
d: You’ve mentioned directors that have influenced you. What are your main influences as far as writing goes?
F: Well, I read The Brothers Karamazov several months ago, and that changed my life. Dostoyevsky is amazing. Melville was a big influence. I’m not all the way through Moby Dick yet, but I read one of his first books called Typee. That’s actually where I got the name Pop Gun War from. Children’s books are a big influence. The Chronicles of Narnia was a big influence. J.R.R. Tolkien stuff was a big influence. On the plane ride back from A.P.E., I finished Ethan Coen’s book, The Gates Of Eden. He and his brother are another pair of my favorite filmmakers.
d: In your masterful opinion, do dogs have lips?
F: Yeah, I think they do actually. When I think of a dog’s face, I see a little lighter skinned area where the fur stops, before you get to the gums and the teeth. That, to me, is a lip.
d: Good answer. Now on a more serious note, do you think O.J. will ever find the real killers?
F: I think you’re asking the wrong man. I was annoyed the whole time that thing was going on. I know this was kind of messed up, but I just really didn’t care about any of it. I don’t watch the news very much, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I don’t keep up on current events. To me it seems very much like he got away with something.
d: So what’s next for Meat Haus and Pop Gun War?
F: Well, issue two of Pop Gun War should have been done by now. But it should be ready to hit the stands sometime this summer. Issue four of Meat Haus is coming back from the printer this week, so we’ll have it at the S.P.A.C.E. Con in Ohio. Issue five is going to be amazing. We’re going to change the format a little bit. It’ll be the same size, only thicker. We’re going to add a lot more stuff in there. Not just comics, but writing and artwork as well.
d: Cool. Last Question: What are you going to do when you get off the phone with me?
F: I’m probably going to try to figure out how much money I have left so I can pay my rent this month. I’m gonna clean up my area, try to get organized, and start work on inking Pop Gun War #2. I’m shooting for a page a day, so it’ll maybe take three weeks to get it finished, and probably a few weeks after that to get it printed. I have to figure out how I’m going to get money to have it printed. No more grant money on this one.


EMAIL FAREL AT FARELKAHN@YAHOO.COM TO SEE MORE.