Brad Neely’s body of work encompasses everything from absurdist comic books to a revisionist take on a certain early president; he’s also written about the life of Ulysses S. Grant. His latest book, Creased Comics, encompasses decades of his work; in the pages within, readers will find everything from feral leprecauns to an especially enthusiastic shark. I spoke with Neely about a range of topics, from Arkansas punk to his fondness for history.
I appreciated your list of influences and topics because you mentioned Raymond Pettibon as one formative influence on you. You also mentioned growing up in Arkansas. So I was curious: were you a part of the Little Rock punk scene at the time? Was that kind of going on when you were developing as an artist?
I grew up in Fort Smith, Arkansas. It’s on the border. It’s True Grit city. Little Rock is about three hours away. Back then Fayetteville was the University of Arkansas city. Those spots had a considerable underground punk music scene. And as you seem to know, Little Rock definitely had some people who were pretty serious and professional about it.
In Fort Smith, I was part of the scene that was a smaller population of all manner of misfits who came together and made angry loud music. We would travel to Little Rock and play at Vino’s and house shows and stuff, but rarely did my little contingent do that. We were happy just kind of staying where we were.
Was the punk scene how you got introduced to Pettibon’s art?
Yes. Particularly the liner notes of the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime. There were a number there in that record, if I remember right. His art was such an inspiration. I feel like it’s kind of obvious. It’s like if you blended Pettibon with Gary Larson; that was kind of the sweet spot for me.
I feel like there was a formative moment where absurdism made inroads in pop culture. The Far Side is one example, and I can remember reading an article a few years ago that argued that Jack Handy’s Deep Thoughts had been a big influence on a lot of young writers.
I grew up watching SNL kind of religiously. It’s always been a part of my life. SNL, I think, has always been good. Even the down years have great things because people feel emboldened to try new stuff. But the Jack Handy era was just sterling for kids in the middle of America. You’d watch SNL and it was the first thing you talked about on Monday with your friends.
As someone who uses absurdism in your own work, is it especially challenging to create something that resonates with readers?
I started doing these kinds of cartoons in high school. The drawing style hasn’t changed much since then. I studied anatomy and life drawing and that strengthened my opportunities for settings and depictions of people and their bodies real fast. I always say the style is like doing life drawing, but with a gun to your head; you have to go as fast as you can. I just I did what I thought would make my friends laugh.
A lot of my friends, the same friends who were in bands with me and going around doing silly stuff on weekends — this is trying to make those guys laugh. And if they did, then I felt like I was on to something. Luckily I had some very tasteful, intelligent friends growing up and still do. And when I moved to Austin, I also had some old friends from Arkansas that had moved down there and some new friends that had also come to Austin. It was the same thing. I would just draw a hundred of them at a go, and then my friends would come over to watch a stupid movie and have an excessive amount of drinks. I would show them then, and they really liked them. So that’s when I really felt like I was on to something.
In the book, you wrote about taking a bunch of comics to the student newspaper in Austin and them agreeing to publish them, and that led to more of an audience for your work.
It was a surprise. I still think this style of humor may age out. Things get old, especially comedy and rock and roll. They both have a way of aging, but then they also have a way of becoming timeless or continuing past their prime in a sort of classic vein. I’ve always tried to work in a timeless way, not too topical much of the time. Of course, there are things that will betray the time that it was made. Just focusing on what I’m satirizing or making fun of can kind of seem like 2007 or whatever.
I think that’s helped me out: being able to work in a vein that anybody could get if they just gave it a second. I don’t really do jokes, but I depict humorous scenarios.
Reading through the book, I laughed very, very frequently and very hard. And I have to ask: one of the running motifs involves some very, very creepy leprechauns in this book. But — the movie with Warwick Davis aside — leprechauns aren’t usually thought of as scary. Where did the idea to use them as more menacing figures come from?
I grew up in Arkansas, as we’ve covered, and most people there come from…”sportsmen” is what they like to call it. Hunting and fishing people. All all of my growing up was around hunting season and animals and sharing your world with these creatures in a respectful manner, even though you were killing them.
With leprechauns, I just thought of them as something you could come upon in the woods, but they had a little bit more agency than your usual living creature out there. What seemed kind of terrifying to me is that they are these tiny superpowered people. There’s something about them, too, that they are the tacit ambassador for capitalism to me. They like to bestow riches, but it’s always a trick. And there’s just something about hunters or fishermen catching a leprechaun whilst out getting breakfast that makes me laugh.
There’s also a running motif of werewolves, from the movie star who’s secretly a werewolf to the werewolf father and son stumbling upon the end of some trench warfare.
I love werewolves, as a hirsute individual. Puberty and becoming something that you’re afraid of becoming is a theme that I like about humans. It’s also evolutionary psychology, our animal DNA programming that we have to come to terms with, or not. It’s the old Jekyll and Hyde thing, but I love just the idea of an animal man who, for all intents and purposes, has given in to his passions and has given up on reason and just going going around eating and fucking whatever he can dominate, which is the scariest thing in the world to me. It’s not my kind of dude. A werewolf is, to me, kind of a symbol for a guy who grew up not around women.
Is that also at the root of the recurring guy who’s shouting “Free Country!” as he does various horrific things?
Yeah, “Free Country” guy came later. I think I drew those while I was making TV out here. I quickly drew some on a Cintiq, which I don’t usually like using. I love the exploration of the end of good ideas. Obviously, we can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded business and we have all of these agreed upon limits to our freedom, but there are still some people who consider freedom to have an unlimited capacity. I just like depicting a guy with that mindset, doing shit that is clearly not allowed, and doing so in the name of his individual freedom.
You’d also listed the Outback era of the X-Men as one of your influences, which I was really happy to see. The Chris Claremont/Marc Silvestri team was doing outstanding work there.
I had no idea that that was a deviation from X-Men. When I first got into comics, I stopped at 7-Eleven walking home, and that was what was on the rack. This drawing style appealed to me. Australia appealed to me. It was the 80s. We loved our Australian fantasies. I realized later in life that a lot of people resented the Outback X-Men. They were my core team. I love the setup. It was interesting because there was a balance of like male and female characters, and I was invested in everybody’s emotional problems.
And what a great string of artists. That early Silvestri work, his gestural manner. I think it was Dan Green who was the inker. What a team, just these chunky, expressive, figurative, stylized, but still grounded in fundamentals. That and Excalibur at the same time with Alan Davis. Reading those and thinking, “OK, I guess this is kind of a normal thing to read.” They were these psychedelic mind fucks, especially for a little mind. Thinking about it now, that’s definitely part of the foundation for the work I do.
Real life history plays a big role in your work as well: you’ve written about Ulysses S. Grant, and my first exposure to your work was through George Washington. What attracts you to these subjects, and how do you filter them through your sensibility?
I like history for a number of reasons. It’s a kind of a cheat because everybody knows who George Washington is. I don’t have to introduce that character, so you can jump right into the spoof. Working with preexisting ideas has its rewards. And I think working with history just also has a built in irreverence if you’re going to get off track.
There hadn’t been Drunk History and all of that when I did Washington. It felt like, well, this is kind of a little corner I can mine. But also, history is one of many philosophical problems that I like to depict people finding themselves perplexed in. The present that we’re living in is very revisionist and makes everybody fearful about what was revisionist that we weren’t aware of. And how can you confirm such a thing? It’s just a very fruitful place for me talking about the past — and all past is history, personal or public. Trying to get an accurate account of me and anybody else who is working on that kind of philosophical area is an unsolved issue with our species. Also, that is just too too fun to to not fuck with.
Is that also where doing something like Wizard People comes from, where it is also riffing on an existing project, but turning it into something very, very different?
I like talking about the subjective nature of the viewer and Wizard People being an alternate audio for the first Harry Potter movie is how I billed it. But the character that I do is this guy who’s doing this audio book for the movie. I think it’s clear that he’s watching the movie for the first time and he’s very supportive. And I think he kind of sees himself in the role of Harry. He makes it all about him instead of what he’s watching and trying to keep up with describing.
That’s the same exact apparatus I put on Ulysses S. Grant for the novel: how do you talk about somebody who’s been dead for a long time that you’ve never had a firsthand account about? I do think it becomes about the person talking about him at least 50%. Even if you’re trying to be a very, very good professional historian, you’re making different editorial choices than the other guy who’s writing the other Grant biography.
What was the process like as far as selecting which comics were going to go in this collection and which ones weren’t?
I was very lucky to be working with New York Review Comics. Lucas Adams is a great editor and I sent him everything I have and he made the initial selections. There might have been a dozen where I said, “I would like these in there that you missed.” Either we put them in as additions or we left them out.
There are probably a thousand more that weren’t put into this one. There’s a list I’ve been keeping since the 2000s of 3000 ideas to draw. I’ve just had my hands full with TV and parenting and stuff. Now that this book’s come out, I’m reinvigorated and I’ve been kind of working through that list. It’s pretty exciting because it does feel like the old Creased and I’ll be drawing the same way. It’s just new ideas that kind of fit right with the old ones.
What are you working on these days beyond new Creased? Is there anything you can talk about that you’re excited about?
I’m always in development one way or another. And with television, one aspect of a career is that you do a lot of it in private and you don’t talk about it. There are close calls. There’s so many shows where I got close to airing, and didn’t. But it still pays the bills to develop. I’ve got a couple of those that are on the front burners that I feel very positive about, and I’ll just leave it at that.
I have a love-hate relationship with television and Hollywood. But what I have on deck has me invested like I haven’t felt in a long time. Other than that, I have a dozen or more projects that I just jump around on like that. Art TV, this stuff is now kind of coming up in the front. But there are two or three novels that are almost done that I just keep getting pulled away from. So those will be out in short order.