Andy Hartzell interview
Andy Hartzell’s graphic novel “Fox Bunny Funny” is a comic pantomime with serious themes — alienation, repression, bigotry — that are played out by foxes and bunnies. The book is as surprising in its good humor as it is in its depth, both blending together effortlessly to examine the heartache of one young fox and his search for self in a world where there are certain expectations of fox behavior.
Most of us have been that fox at one point or another.
Hartzell’s work has appeared in “Boy Trouble” — his first self-published work was the 1995 Xeric grant winner, “Bread & Circuses.” Lately, Hartzell has been working on “Monday,” a story about the Garden of Eden that he is self-publishing.
JM: Initially, I read “Fox Bunny Funny” because it didn’t have any words and I thought, well, I can read this quickly.
AH: That’s an opposite reaction from a lot of people. People I know have hesitated to read it because it has no words. I think that has intimidated some people. They feel like without words, they won’t really know what’s going on, it’ll be hard to follow, and they hesitate for that reason. I get both reactions.
JM: That’s funny, considering it’s a visual medium. With comics, I get annoyed with too much narration, too many thought bubbles.
AH: Most of my work does have dialogue, but I do tend to stay away from narrative blocks and it’s not like a real decision that I made. I think more in dramatic terms as opposed to depiction and description, I like the acting to tell the story. You wind up laying books out a little differently when you include narration you tend to lay out stories so that each panel is its own little illustrated page. If you leave out the narration, the panel to panel transitions become more important and the acting has to carry it a little more and that interests me.
JM: Without words and thought balloons to tell you what the character is thinking, you’re reliant on body language — but in your book, the characters are funny animals. That’s can be a hard thing to get emotion into.
AH: I guess so. It’s different doing expressions on animals. I’ve done more realistic stuff, though most of my stuff is cartoony, but I have noticed with other work I’ve done in the past, I’ve used a mirror to get the expression right, which I couldn’t really do with these characters because their features are just too far removed from my own. It just takes it a little further into hieroglyphics and finding these standardized ways of registering surprise or thinking or whatever emotion you’re trying to convey – and, I guess, pulling a little more from the history of comic strips and the way other artists have done it and it becomes a stock language that you can draw from.
JM: What was the conceptualization of the story? How much of an autobiographical component is there to it? It seems like there are bits and pieces, emotionally.
AH: There is, although it’s all abstracted. It’s hard for me to go back and reconstruct how I conceptualized the story, but it had to do somewhat with the fact that I had done several stories over the course of a few years for an ongoing anthology called “Boy Trouble,” which is published by Rob Kirby and David Kelly and their tag line is “Queer comics with a new attitude” or something like that. It was intended to be younger generation gay stories. Now we’re not really the younger generation anymore, I guess, but that was the idea. I had done several of these stories and at a certain point, there’s a part of me that rebels against the ghettoization of stories dealing with identity. I was drawing comics that had to do with being gay and for gay people and that’s great, but there’s a part of me that always rebels against the idea that if you are gay, you’re experience is only going to be understandable by other gay people and it seemed like there was something more universal.
I just wanted to tell a story or communicate in a way that would cross over different boundaries. Also, as being gay has become more mainstream, there have emerged certain assumptions, especially with things like coming out stories where you almost don’t even have to read the story because you know where it’s going and what it’s going to be saying and it falls into these conventions which kind of make it boring. And there are things just about dealing with the conflict between your inner fantasy life and your outer identity that I thought there were new ways of saying. In order for people to think about the issues, you had to take it out of the context of a gay story. Those were some of the underlying motivation.
I’m rationalizing it after the fact, but at a certain point this metaphor occurred to me and over the course of a day or two, the story — at least the first two-thirds of the story — all fell into place. Once you start with this metaphor, what is the world going to be like, what is the conflict going to be, how is the character going to deal with it? Up through the end of the second part, it all seemed to naturally fall into place and then the third part, because I knew the story couldn’t be over there, it took longer and actually, in its final form, didn’t emerge until pretty late. I drew the whole thing and the ending was different and it wasn’t until after I had people look at it, thre months later, that the way the story ends fell into place.
JM: The story could be taken as a commentary on being gay or even being curious, but that seems like a limiting way to think about it. It could be applied to any sort of alienation and that’s not common, people don’t generalize alienation, people personalize it. In an era of memoirs and blogs, where everything is made personal, this is an alienation we could all feel together.
AH: But it is particular, because it is the particular experience of a fox who wants to be a bunny.
JM: How much thought did you give to the animals you wanted to use?
AH: In the very beginning I toyed with the idea of creating a world with multiple species, and there would be all different kinds of rodent characters, but I ditched that pretty early on.
JM: Some of the issues you address in that context come off as very institutionalized — not just distrust of people who are different, but actual hostility towards people who are different.
AH: I guess I would say there is an element of autobiography in that I grew up in West Michigan in a small country town, a very conservative part of the country, so I definitely experienced a culture that is very conservative, and so I certainly did experience my share of that distrust and dislike of people who are different. And then I did make my way first to Las Vegas and then out to the Bay Area and there are elements of both in the city at the end of the book. The experience of that and the feeling of experiencing a change in your surroundings — a disorienting change in your surroundings — it’s common to the character in the book and me. I don’t think his history and my history are really alike, but that much is similar.
JM: Have you ever looked back and found yourself in the other position, the one confused by the person who is different?
AH: I have to say, since I finished this book, I have a friend who has come out as transgendered and it surprised most of his friends — her friends now — by doing so. I was put in the position of having to really think, having to explore certain categories and figuring out if I really can go to the place where I say that sex and gender are two completely different and disconnected things and that’s kind of hard concept. On one level, it’s easy to be accepting and to cheer someone on, but on another level, to have to deal with the shift in categories in your own thinking, in your own world view. It’s a challenge.
JM: Did that experience affect the way you look at the story?
AH: I had completed the story at that time. For him — or her — he found the story to be like it was speaking to him. He had not yet made the decision to make that transition when he read the book.
I’ve been really gratified that a lot of people have found meaning in it — and different meaning. People have seen it as a commentary on vegetarianism, which had not occurred to me when I did it. Some people have seen it parallel to different political situations around the world.
When I drew the story, I was really hoping that it wouldn’t have just one meaning. I really did want it to be something where it would cause people to disagree. I had these visions of late night cafes in Paris where people would be arguing about the meaning of the book and I liked that! I tried to make it not too simple, not too cut and dry, not too much of a single interpretation.
JM: Have you encountered anyone who said “Meaning? I just thought it was funny.”
AH: Everyone thinks it has some kind of meaning, but it’s a good question because it should just be something that you can just read. But it’s kind of the opposite. People who haven’t liked it so much, their problem with it has been that it was obvious that it was some sort of allegory, but it wasn’t a crisp enough allegory. It couldn’t just completely map to the gay experience, because, of course, straight people don’t eat gay people. The first part of the story seemed very much about sexual identity, while the second part of the story was more like the oppression of one ethnic group by another and they thought I was playing it fast and loose, not making it about one thing. To me, that’s what I like about it.
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Tags: Andy Hartzell, Fox Bunny Funny, Top Shelf Productions
