Mark Haven Britt

Yes about six years ago I moved there and met up with my wife. I had just come back from San Diego and had a bunch of rejections and was thinking about giving up on comics all together. I had these loose ideas floating around in my studio and I was sitting there with a boss that I couldn’t stand and I was just like, “Man, this is not where I want to be.” My wife was like, “Get back into comics. You were happier when you were working on comics.” At the time, I thought it was a book that would be an escapist pulp thriller but it evolved into something else. I thought it was going to be about 48 pages and it ended up to be 179. I wrote it when I was in New York and I’ve basically been drawing it ever since.

Yeah, I was outlining it after September 11. I certainly didn’t set out to do like September 11 raise the flag kind of book. But there’s just something about that time that caused me to look a little more inward. I also had a bunch of ideas about the ending, but I didn’t quite pull the trigger until I was far enough away from it to be comfortable with it.

Yes, Sarah did comics long before I ever started. Before she ever saw what I did she was like, “You got to put me in your book.” So I did.

I definitely wanted to draw someone as different from me as possible. A lot of guys model their guys off themselves and I wanted to model mine based on someone that was as far away from me as humanly possible. So I figured a black woman was as far away from me as I could get.

Yeah, the first 20 pages were done while I was in New York in pen and ink. Then I switched to the computer and hated it but by the end I thought it was awesome. I think the Wacom Tablet is the four track of comics. I never figured out how to ink until I stopped inking. It freed me up to experiment and my hand doesn’t hurt as much as much as it used to. I went back and redrew the first 20 pages and rendered it on the computer.

The tablet is basically a big square piece of plastic and there’s a little pen for it which moves similarly to the mouse but its pressure sensitive. So the harder you press, the fatter the line gets and the softer you press, the thinner the line gets. So it really replicates what a regular pen or brush would look like. So I drew it top to bottom. I would thumbnail it out, lay it out and ink it. But essentially it has all the effects of ink, but you can erase. It’s very cool and I find that it really frees you up for composition because you get like, “Ah, that building’s perfect, but the composition would be perfect if I moved it to the left but I’m not redrawing that.” So you can just do that.

For me, it’s definitely a hybrid between books and painting, so you are supposed to be left asking some questions, hopefully good questions. Half the people who read it think that it’s optimistic and the other half think it’s pessimistic. So I think that sums up what I was going for. The questions for me were, how stuck are we with our life and work and is there a way out? That’s really something I was trying to get out of myself.

No, never. I had written and drawn some stuff in college that I got about 40 pages done and then hated it, so I threw it out. But this is my first really complete work.

I would say the art style would be similar. They were something like superhero-y but everyone looked like normal people. The art style was there but I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say. I was more interested in form. Then when I sat down and read the stuff I was working on, I was not happy with what it was saying.

It changed a lot. It got more serious as it went along. Initially I wanted it to be all fights and people running around but it became more reflective. There are a lot of two-page spreads where I’m sitting observing different places in New York like Astor Place or Washington Square Park, and just meditating on the feeling of city life and the chaotic feeling of that. But it became more of an emotional experience for me than I thought it would be.

A little bit here and there. It’s always so tempting working with a computer but as soon as it feels like it’s not drawing I don’t want to do it. There are certain places that have a collagy feel but even if I set something in the scene that I wanted to trace around, I have to move the camera around in such a way that you end up redrawing it anyway. So some parts yes, some parts no.

No, I pretty much I stayed in that frame of mind. Any new thoughts I put into separate projects, like some of the stuff I’m working on now. Every single time I worked on it, I worked to get back into that same space. It definitely changed more in the first six months than it did in the last four years.

No, not at all. This is literally my first crack at it.

Yeah, that’s something that was with it for a while. I always assumed I would self-publish it and color wasn’t going to be an option. People are asking me what the title means and not to be too cute but it is looking for color, looking to fulfill yourself. It’s just very optimistic, something to look for in life.

I had a Xeric Grant for this book actually. That was great because, particularly at that time, it was just nice to have that emotional boost to know that someone is interested in your work and thinks it’s worth investing in. Then I was ferociously late on it and they were very patient. Then I got a publisher and they said I will always be a Xeric award winner but I needed to tear up the check [laughs]. So it was a win-win. They gave me what I needed so. They are amazing. It’s such a wonderful and important grant.

I thought it was great. Fortunately the Bay area is filled with cartoonists. Three of my neighbors are cartoonists, so I have a lot of feedback. I have a really strong community out here giving me advice. I like having a voice to bounce things off of, so I wouldn’t be uncomfortable in a situation with an editor. But it was really helpful to be able to feel your way through it and make it yourself and try to come up with something by yourself and being able to bounce that off of someone.

Yeah, I bumped into Eric at my local comic shop and the owner there mentioned that I was working on a book and that he should check it out. He read the book and was interested in publishing it. We started talking and initially I was saying I would like to work there in a design capacity but he said, “There’s a slot opening in marketing that I think you would do well in.”

It’s incredibly awkward. I love my book. I love the voice of my book. I think as an entity, it does what it needs to do. Now I’m so appreciative of the service that a marketing guy does for you. But it’s not easy to look inward and say, “What is it about?” Particularly if your book is a little unorthodox. You’re like, “It’s great, but it’s really weird. It’s totally morbid, but it’s kind of funny.” What’s been great about the job is that I see every facet. I meet tons of cool folks, from the creators to the retailers to the bookstore representatives. It’s an incredibly complex business. It’s absolutely the process of boiling down your book is important because if you can’t do it in one sentence, somebody else is going to. Everyone else just takes a look at it, summarizes it, and passes on to the next person. Everybody, particularly media folk and the people trying to sell it are like, “What’s the one-sentence pitch?” To come up with those is like a Zen art.

I grew up in Canton which is about 30 miles south of Boston area. Irish-Catholic from south of, not southie. Big difference.

It was something I really enjoyed doing. I wouldn’t say I was really good, like I wasn’t one of those kids who was mind-blowing. There are many people in elementary school and middle school who were way better than I was but are now investment bankers. I don’t think I became much better than your average person until I went to college. In junior high and high school, I did all kinds of stuff, sports, plays, all that jazz. But I wasn’t the exceptionally gifted one. I once made a sculpture with that dude from Survivor, that Boston Rob guy.

I went to Canton High School, which is an innocuous high school. My dad was the superintendent of a school for the handicapped in Canton and my mom was a bookkeeper. For college, I went to the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. I was awful when I got there and came out pretty good. I really credit the teachers there. They really were good.

Yeah, I’ve got a couple things in the pipeline. I’m working on like a big knuckleheaded superhero book. It’s set in a place that has been flooded, similar to New Orleans, and the flood waters have baptized some people with superpowers. Also I’m doing a murder–mystery. It’s a coming-of-age story from my experience in Boston. Another one of the books I’m working on is a biography of my dad, who was a Roman Catholic priest and I was recording some stuff with him before he died. I’m searching out some of the priests he went to priest school with but I think that is a longer term project.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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