Scott Thill

That Thompson’s newest solo album riffs on his dual identities may not come as a surprise to the Pixies faithful, but you can be sure that the reinvented versions of old Pixies standards like “Caribou” and “Subbacultcha” at the hands of producers Two Pale Boys (also known as Andy Diagram and Keith Moline) will. But Thompson is a rock ‘n’ roll animal who can quickly become bored with whatever he’s doing and is apt to follow his artistic muse wherever it takes him. How else to explain why the man U2′s Bono called one of America’s most gifted songwriters of all time (in “Gouge,” a U.K. documentary about the band) would, without any real warning, break up what Bono (and many others) also called one of America’s most significant bands of all time? How else to explain how, after years of refusing to answer questions about the Pixies and trying to downplay their significance, he summarily reformed the band 12 years after they’d called it quits and set about touring the world like nothing ever happened?

Don’t look to Thompson for answers. He seems to be professionally comfortable when he’s doing one thing only: making music, in the studio or on the stage. And even that seems a recent development; dedicated Pixies fans who remember that he looked none too happy playing concerts with the band sometime after the “Doolittle” tour will notice how Thompson seems to be truly enjoying himself this time around. Back in 1992, if bassist Kim Deal messed up “Debaser” and caused the band to stop the show in midsong, as she did recently at a packed gig in Berkeley, Calif., Pixies die-hards would have cringed and waited for Thompson to chuck an instrument at her. He’s done it before. But in the Pixies’ new afterlife, Thompson merely stops and good-naturedly heckles her before starting up the whole song again. With the new kinder, gentler Pixies, it’s all good.

But one thing that hasn’t changed about Thompson is his interview style. He can be variously tangential, disengaged, ecstatic and bored. Thompson did eventually answer a few questions about what the band’s future might hold, but not before firmly placing Spin magazine, tabloid gossip, pugnacious journos, the “soulless” mainstream scene, VH1′s utter banality and much more in his cross hairs and pulling the trigger. In other words, if you’ve come for answers to big questions about the band, you’ve come to the wrong place.

How do you feel about having to sit down and do this after years of not having to talk about the Pixies?

The tour is doing very well. There are a few markets where the tickets weren’t completely sold out, so from a business point of view you could say we could do something to urge things to go all the way. Also, I suppose there are other things to do to maintain our profile somewhere, on the business side of things. So our publicist can talk us up to people like, I don’t know who, David Letterman’s booker or whoever … You know, she says, “Do these three things, and I’ll be really happy.” But with the Pixies, we’re so like, there is nothing to say — not really, not from our point of view. What is there really to say, you know? Some trite VH1 baloney … You know, there’s been a proliferation of this sort of thing, heartfelt moments presented on TV. There’s so much of that, so that when you, in a friendly way, mock it with the interviewer, they’re really surprised. It’s kind of like they don’t get it.

Most of your interviews in the ’80s and ’90s didn’t have anything to do with the albums. You seem pretty particular about what you talk about, and won’t.

Maybe, but I don’t know, it’s also the person you’re sitting down with. Sometimes I talk to journalists that ask the 10 most basic questions there are to ask, and I have a totally great interview with them. It’s just sometimes you can tell … I don’t know … you can tell if they’re smart or what their level of interest is. Even though you don’t know them, you have some sense of who they are, what their drive or commitment to their craft is … And other people? You can tell they don’t …

Know you?

No, it’s not about me, whether they get me or something like that. It’s “Why are you really here? What’s your bag, man?” Because with some people you’re just like … [heavy sigh] … You end up being snotty with them, because it drives you nuts. It’s already driving you nuts, even before they open their mouth. Because you’re just waiting for it, until you get to “Yes! I knew they were like that!” And I feel bad for them afterwards, because they’re trying to be nice — and you’re trying to be nice, but you just can’t help it. You want to say, “That’s a really stupid question.” I mean, I don’t say that, but I say that between the lines: “I don’t like your question.” And sometimes this guy’s question is the same as that guy’s question, but I can just tell the way that he asks it. Like with fucking Spin magazine — nice guy and everything, but …

What?

He wanted to do a follow-up on the whole face-to-face time he spent with us. It’s just the way he asked everything — and he might not even have intended it this way. Maybe I just had an overly knee-jerk reaction to the way he asked it. So after all this hanging out — where I took him to the laundromat, the coffee shop and everywhere else — I then have to do a 20-minute follow-up call on my cellphone during a gig. And I don’t have a lot of patience as it is at this point, especially since he’s asking so many general questions … And we’re literally in the last moments and he’s like, “So Frank, you’re having a kid.” [Laughs] You know what I mean? And it’s like, “Yeah, I’m having a kid.” I could tell what he wanted, some fucking trite comment on fatherhood, blah, blah, blah. It’s just like, goddamn it all, I’m not going to do that. I was thinking, OK, he asked that question. My girlfriend could be reading this article. We’re kind of new, so she’s not quite used to seeing me misquoted and taken out of context over and over again, or saying something that infuriates her. So I’m going, “Goddamn it, be careful what you say here.” After all, we’re talking about the being that’s in her body right now, so I do something else for this guy and it comes out in print. And I’m like, “Oh, there’s the Spin magazine, oh God. No, don’t buy it. It’s going to ruin our night.” She says, “It’s OK, Charles, whatever you want to do.” And then I thought maybe I’m being too upset about this. So I’m having fun reading it, and she starts reading it and it’s [makes an explosive noise]! She’s pregnant, know what I mean? So I was like, “I knew it! I knew you were going to read that and think that.” I made some comment, just kind of impersonal and not real …

You’re not going to bare your soul about fatherhood.

Exactly. I’m not going to give it to you. You don’t deserve it!

Someone from Spin magazine who was probably in sixth grade when the Pixies were around called my manager a year ago and was like, you know, “Spin magazine really wants to do a piece, a cover, full art, all exclusive. We’re really, really big fans of the band.” And my manager, Ken Goes, answers, “Actually you’re not really big fans.” She says, “No, no, no, we’re really big fans of Frank Black, the Breeders.” Ken’s like, “Excuse me, you don’t know of what you speak. You haven’t written about my client in fucking 11 years and you only wrote one piece about his old band, which was not that flattering. So actually you’re not fans.” I don’t know. I mean, whatever. It’s all personality exploitation. There’s nothing really about music. And that’s what’s wrong with all the VHI stuff and everything.

It’s manufactured product.

And they never ask you about your songs. They want to talk about [in a nerdy voice] “How do you write your songs? What are your songs about?” As if I had an answer to that question! What do you mean? How do I write my songs? Not to make a big deal out of it, but it’s so assuming. You’re assuming that I have this method of writing, and it’s the same one I use for every single song.

Well, the thing about Q-and-A’s is that no one can put words in your mouth.

I don’t mind Q-and-A’s. I just feel like these journalists are all struggling to be legitimate writers. They’re just in the music biz to work on their résumé. Which is fine — we all have to work on our résumés — but I feel like they’re not really into it. I just have this fantasy: I have my own damn rock band. I want to be Lou Reed and I want the writer to be Lester Bangs. Know what I mean? I want him to be so into it that he’s arguing with me about the validity of a song I wrote. I don’t care if it’s insulting. I don’t care if it’s challenging or whatever.

All of those fucking music magazines are so gossipy. None of them are really about music or songs or records or just all the stuff that’s apparently too nerdy for their audience.

What’s going to happen when this tour is over? Where do you guys go from here?

What does a band do? They go out on tour and then if they feel they have to make it or continue to make their mark, they go and write music and record it. We’re not really in that mode, because right now we’re just playing the old songs and getting paid lots of money for it. That’s all anyone is asking for, so that’s all we’re motivated to do. People haven’t come to us and said, “Warner Bros. really wants to know if you were to make your grand LP statement right now, what it would be? Just please do some kind of contract with us.” Where are those guys? They’re not interested. Business is business, and I understand how business works. Fine. But, I don’t know, if I ran a record company I’d be a little more curious about it. Actually, there’s been one label, one guy who has been very motivated to get us to record. But yeah, generally they’re not asking and, to be honest, neither is the audience. I don’t know how they would ask, but that’s not really what this is all about. This is all just about, “You guys broke up too soon and I was in high school. So please tour again.”

I don’t know. We’ve barely even talked about it or thought about it.

Really?

Well, we have, but mostly for fun. It hasn’t been blatant. A week ago, we chatted about doing this or doing that, but it’s just fun talk … I just don’t know what to say about it. Make a record because … why?

Well, the tour is lucrative, for one reason. Your band changed music. You changed music.

I don’t know about that. [Mockingly] Kurt Cobain liked us. Nothing against him — that’s great that he liked us — but we’re a quirky band and a bunch of people liked us. I don’t know that we really changed anything. I was telling my friend about this. The Pixies came out at a time when heavy metal was pretty big, and that was just at the more banal end of the spectrum. And then there were all these Eastern Seaboard-based college rock bands, which we were part of, I guess. So we were in contrast to the mainstream, and now people are saying, “Frank, you spawned a whole new generation of alternative rock music.” And I’m thinking, what alternative rock music? You mean that masculine new heavy metal — and I got nothing against heavy metal, mind you — that’s just a more macho upgrade of the glossy, hairspray, effeminate heavy metal that was in the mainstream when we were coming out? I don’t know, man. Maybe I’m just getting old, but mainstream music now seems so much more soulless than it was back in the ’80s.

It’s almost cyclical. Metal became nu-metal, the boy bands became Britney Spears, and now that you guys are reappearing at this déjà vu period in time, it seems you’re helping — along with other bands — push that cycle hopefully forward again.

[Total silence]

OK, you’re not accepting that. Let’s change gears.

No, I do accept it, but how could I have a response to that? “Yes I am?” What am I supposed to say? What’s there to say? There isn’t anything to say. If that’s what we did, then so be it. It’s out of my hands. We just go into a room, plug in a bunch of amps and come up with a repertoire. That’s how it is. In the arena of entertainment, we are trying to have fun and be entertaining via this thing called rock music, popular music or whatever. And that’s it.

I think there are probably not enough people making music that allows their personalities to be what they are, to be there as part of the art. Which is necessary, I think, for cool music. It doesn’t matter what kind of music it is; it has nothing do to with that. It’s really about saying, “Hey, I have a personality and I’m not going to keep it hidden.” Too many people are trying too hard to be something that they’re not, and no one really believes it. And that’s always the problem with something that’s very good: People are usually like, “I don’t buy this. They think they know what I want, but I don’t even know what I want.” No one knows what he or she wants. You like. That’s what it is. You don’t know. The reason you know what you want is because something struck a chord in you and you go, “Oh, I like this.” But no one knows what they want, they don’t have any preconceived notions. We’re human beings. We were born without language; we don’t know what we want. We get exposed to things and decide we like them. The problem with the people who aren’t very good is that they are trying so hard — to have a hit, have a career — that they’re not being themselves.

A lot of people have pointed to the compositional nature of the Pixies songs as a major reason the band has had such staying power.

Well, it would be far too simple to say that’s the only reason people like us. Because we have plenty of songs that are plenty square. Well, not square per se, but … well, you know. The quirkier the song is, the less it was thought about. I don’t know. People are just too aware of those things.

Such is the story of the photographer Boogie, whose gritty photography collection, “It’s All Good,” out now from New York’s powerHouse Books, chronicles the lives of thugs, hustlers and addicts without artifice. Currently based in Brooklyn, N.Y., he was born and raised in Serbia, and was eventually mired waist-deep in that conflict-torn country’s unremitting violence and war during the ’90s. After serving his stint in the military and getting lucky with a lottery draw for a green card, he fled the country for safer environs, only to be pulled back into the violent battle for the soul’s deliverance, this time in a drug-addicted New York that looks nothing like the megamall environs favored by Rudolph Guiliani, George Pataki and Michael Bloomberg. In fact, “It’s All Good” is a visual document that would most likely give those three fits, filled as it is with could-give-a-fuck individuals living fix to fix, fight to fight, weapon to weapon.

Of course, Boogie himself, like every American immigrant or native, is negotiating both worlds, shutterbugging for Nike (a company that knows more than a few things about image manipulation and capitalization) and other clients to keep the bills paid as he pursues the addicted phantoms that inhabit the United States’ invisible, ignored streets and ghettos. If only to find, in the end, that true reality, the kind that creeps up behind you execution style, will not, if ever, be televised. We exchanged a series of e-mails in between Boogie’s hectic promotion of “It’s All Good” and a project for Nike.

Reading and viewing “It’s All Good,” one gets the feeling that heroin and crack, not weed, are the real gateway drugs.

Heroin and crack are never the gateway drugs; they are the end of the line. All of my subjects started out with marijuana, and then moved on to something stronger. And once you start smoking crack, you’ll do anything. Pop pills, shoot up, snort coke, anything just to get out of your own head. Junkies are unhappy people living a miserable existence.

What is it about heroin and crack — and the worlds and economies they create — that opens lives up to so much pain?

Being a junkie is a full-time job. Half of the day you hustle to get money for drugs, and the other half you’re stoned or high. Deep inside, they are all sick of that life, but not strong enough to change it. Hopeless, suicidal behavior sometimes kicks in, so they go deeper and deeper, pushing limits all the way.

Which brings up another interesting aspect of your work: Its fearsome haze is firmly centered in everyday life, not some visual arts experiment. Does “It’s All Good’s” focus on the gritty routine of that everyday life bring the surreal life and real life closer together where they belong? Do some take their homogeneous lives too seriously, especially when the troubled lives of those around them (in Iraq, in New York City, in “It’s All Good”) go on without notice?

There are different kinds of reality and I can only speak from my own experience while working on this project. It wasn’t easy for me to hang out with “normal” people. It all seemed kind of fake and weak compared to the reality I was witnessing every day in and around the projects. Since I’ve never been a junkie or a gangster I don’t know why they live in the reality they do. These are questions only they can answer. But it is my hope that the texts I have provided in the book will shed light on their lives. All I did was bring a tape recorder to my subjects and say, “Hey, do you want to tell me your story?” They did.

Race is all over this book, like guns. For years, these drug and gang wars have been portrayed as racial conflicts, but they’re being revealed more and more as economic ones. Would you agree?

I don’t think this book has anything to do with race. Drugs and gangs have nothing to do with race. It’s all economic. Only cash matters.

So where do you find yourself, as the messenger, in all of this?

As a photographer, it is my mission to connect with people and to enter their lives on an intimate level in order to show what is there, without analyzing how they live or passing judgment on their choices. So I’m a documentary photographer who got in too deep on this one. There is a line you shouldn’t cross as a documentarian, but the deeper you go, the better photos you will take. “It’s All Good” was my life for two to three years. In fact, it took over my life, and messed it up a bit, I would say. It was heavy, although not while I was shooting because when I’m behind the camera, I turn my emotions off. But it all stays in your head and gets to you later. I think it was worth it. But yeah, the entire project was very heavy at times. And I wanted to make the book for some time because I wanted to leave a mark — my mark, their mark — to show that we were here.

How has your background influenced your work?

I was born in Serbia in 1969 and lived there until 1998. The war started around 1990-1991, when I was in my early 20s. It was really fucked up. We had 10 years of war, economic crisis, U.N. sanctions, all kinds of misery. I was out of the army by then, but I know many people who fought. That was our reality for 10 years. I never intended to leave, but I got a green card in the lottery so I went. I came to New York in 1998 as an outsider, an immigrant. At first, I lived in Queens, but I moved to Brooklyn in 2001. I had begun taking photographs when I lived in Serbia to document the world around me. In fact, my first personal project was to document Nazi skinheads in 1996 — some of whom were friends of friends. I had access to a world no one else had, and for that, I won some awards. Then I started shooting for some papers on a freelance basis, documenting protests, poverty, Gypsies …

Sounds like that all prepared you for the Big Apple’s rotten core.

When I moved to New York, I sent my portfolio around but nobody wanted me. So I stopped trying to join the agencies, magazines, book publishers, all of that. I pursued my own shit. I lived in Williamsburg, but there was nothing to shoot there. So I started going deeper into Brooklyn and immediately felt at ease. It was easier for me to relate to people who live an everyday struggle than to those whose lives are secure. So I began to meet people on the street, first crackheads and dope fiends. They welcomed me and let me into their lives right away. Dope was big in my country during the war; it was very cheap and some of my friends died of overdoses. So to see it again was kind of familiar and unthreatening.

Did any of your subjects have a problem with you? And why did you start with the gangsters?

I wanted to meet gangsters because I wanted to go to the source. And it was pretty easy: They approached me because I’m a white guy who’s not scared to walk around a black neighborhood with a camera. A week later, they asked me to take pictures of them with guns. I understand they have to do what they have to do to survive. Sometimes good guys do bad things. These people live in an insular world; few of them ever get out and even less visit. But they allowed me into their lives and I am grateful for it. And as a photographer, I sought to present them only as they are and as they want to be seen — to show the same respect they gave me. It is not for me, a white Serbian guy, to explain, judge or defend their choices and their actions. I think my photos do them justice.

Let’s talk about the glamorization of thug life and where “It’s All Good” fits or resists that matrix. Its straight-ahead vibe seems like it wants the subjects to tell their own stories, but its manipulations of the documentary style make it hard to tell what’s cashing in on the game and what’s an earnest social statement. Your thoughts?

I hate to judge people, and I don’t have right to do that. Who am I to judge somebody? All these people from the book could have been me or you, and it’s not too late for that to happen. Life has weird turns, and you never know what might happen. My idea was to show life as it is, and as it is it’s not “Sex and the City” for all of us.

Do you think the pop crossover of gangsters has blurred the lines between capitalizing on the culture and the art of documenting it?

Knowing what I know about ghetto life, I don’t quite understand its glamorization through rap music. I think the first thing any of these rap stars do when they get rich is get the hell out of the ghetto. I don’t listen to rap music. I don’t know anything about thug life. If someone sees that relationship, that is their perception but not my intention.

Is “It’s All Good” a social statement? What would you like a reader to come away thinking and feeling after experiencing it?

I don’t want to moralize or preach but only show life as it is — raw and fucked up at times but not without hope. I cannot say what someone should think or feel after looking at the book; that’s something I leave to them. But the idea is simple: Look, hipster, this is what’s happening in a 10-minute walk from where you live. Not that you can and should do anything about it. But be aware of it.

“It’s the old cliché about grabbing the bull by the horns,” Campbell says. “There is no mystery to it, just an incredible amount of elbow grease, and most people just aren’t built for that.”

To be sure, Campbell’s road, which has also included stops behind or in front of the camera at other fandom bonanzas like the “Hercules” and “Xena: Warrior Princess” television series, has not led directly to the Emerald City of the Hollywood mainstream. But that’s fine by him. In fact, his new, side-splitting exercise in hard-boiled Hollyweird, “Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way,” shows just what kind of chaos can emerge when the straight-shooting icon known mostly by his “Evil Dead” alter ego (the actor-author feels compelled to sign his book jacket “Bruce ‘Don’t Call Me Ash’ Campbell”) enters the ranks of the Hollywood elite ruled by stars like Richard Gere and Renée Zellwegger.

Unlike his previous autobiographical tour de force, “If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor” — which became a national bestseller to the surprise only of those who haven’t seen the “Evil Dead” films — Campbell’s newest book is straight-up fiction, a mash-up of noir action and gut-busting humor centered on the artist’s long-awaited jump to the Big Time. In the book, he stars with Gere and Zellwegger in a Mike Nichols update of George Cukor’s 1960 Marilyn Monroe vehicle, “Let’s Make Love,” a movie Gregory Peck abandoned because he famously felt the script was “about as funny as pushing Grandma down the stairs in a wheelchair.”

Which, come to think of it, happens to Campbell in his new book, although he’s no grandma and it’s Richard Gere who eventually does the honors by throwing him down a flight of stairs. Still, that’s just a taste of the abuse Campbell undergoes on his quixotic mission to make the A-list. For the entirety of “Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way,” its doomed protagonist spends more time getting his ass thoroughly kicked by any number of people rather than doing any actual acting. But perhaps that’s the object lesson to be learned in this metafictional exercise in mayhem, which just happens to moonlight as a relationship advice manual of sorts: If you want to make love the Hollywood way, then perhaps you’d better be ready to take a beating.

I caught up with the opinionated and refreshingly honest Campbell by phone from his Oregon home, where he was setting off to visit some local swimming holes before leaving for a four-month promotional tour. It’s strange, but besides being one of schlock cinema’s enduring supernovas, Campbell is also an environmentalist of sorts; he’s currently wrapping up a three-hour documentary called “A Community Speaks,” a nonpartisan examination of the thorny issue of land stewardship, which he produced and directed with his wife, costume designer Ida Gearon. (This is especially weird if you remember that this is a guy who starred in a horror classic where an ingénue gets raped by a tree.) But Campbell’s tongue is built for more than resting smarmily in his cheek. During our chat, he used it to lambaste Tom Cruise, to explain why yesteryear’s stars like Spencer Tracy get no respect, and to confirm for us, once and for all, that “Healthy Forests” is a opportunist’s euphemism.

I just finished the book last night and it’s hilarious. So I guess the first thing I have to ask you is…

Why did I bother writing it?

Sure, let’s go with that.

Well, it seemed like a good thing to do at the time. Honestly, it all boiled down to the fact that it didn’t make sense to write anything else that was autobiographical. Mostly because, as I joked in the book, according to my publisher I hadn’t done enough to warrant another one. So this was a way to put together material that doesn’t fall too far from my tree, so to speak. I’m still a central character in it, and it still takes place in the movie business, but the book is a pseudo-attempt to convince readers that I’m actually going through everything that’s in it. And that’s basically it. Also, the opportunity to write fiction is always more challenging and fun.

Yeah, I had a hard time separating what I thought was fiction from fact, which made it a blast to read.

Well, I will say this: Of all the characters in the book, probably 90 percent of them could be attributed to someone who’s alive. Honestly, the book has many real characters, as well as a whole series of knuckleheads who don’t exist. But basically everyone was patterned on someone I had met or come across, whether he or she was in the film business or just some general idiot. And as an actor who gets to travel all over the place to different locations, I can always go, “Yeah, there was this weird place in Dallas that I remember.” Which is great, because the problem with writers is that some of them never leave the house. I would encourage any writer to do this thing called traveling.

The book seems to indirectly put across the idea that a guy like you, who’s beloved by tons of fans, doesn’t deserve to hobnob with the A-listers on a Mike Nichols movie.

I know, but it’s also a way to say, “You wanna put me in the A league? Here’s what would really happen!” But overall it’s a way of saying, “Don’t worry about me.”

You feel comfortable where you are.

Oh yeah, what the hell: You wind up where you wind up, and as an actor, you have no idea where you’re going to wind up. You really don’t. And there are a lot of A-list actors today who never gave a shit about acting, so it’s funny how the cookie crumbles. But I defend my position by stating that I have the best of both worlds: I can make a living and make movies that aren’t going to be picked apart by a thousand chefs. When you make a movie for a couple million bucks, there are only going to be so many people involved. And usually there are much fewer than there are on the blockbusters, which makes things much simpler. You don’t have the pressure to have that $20 million opening weekend. So it allows me to just be an actor, which is what I always wanted in the first place. I don’t have to spend 50 percent of my time figuring out how to stay famous. I don’t want to devote that much time to that. Although I do have to tour like a mutherscratcher.

The one thing I took away from your early days is that you and Sam did what many artists consumed by their craft do, which is to just go out and make whatever it is that you want to make, rather than take a class or…

Or wait for someone to discover you! That’s just not the way it works. It’s the old cliché of grabbing the bull by the horns, and the cool thing is that the United States is one of those few places that’s conducive to such a process. You can literally go knock on someone’s door, get him to invest in a movie, go make it, and then sell it around the world. It’s crazy. What kills me is that there is no mystery to it, just an incredible amount of elbow grease, and most people just aren’t built for that. They think it works in a different way. They think that you’re just supposed to get famous, or fall into it.

Is that how you conceived of your arch-nemesis in the book, Rob Stern, a studio exec with no discernible talent or skill other than middle-management manipulation? Is that character based on someone you know?

He’s based on the asshole idiot executives all actors have had to deal with at one time or another. Hollywood has this habit best demonstrated by Tom Cruise on “Oprah.” He goes, “You know, Oprah, I help people. I just have a reputation for that.” Reputation for that! This is what’s killing me. Then I heard a comic say to me once, “Sometimes, I just take off and bust through town! I got a reputation for that!” Everyone wants a reputation for something, and again, to me, that takes away from the craft. It’s like, “What are you, an editor, writer, director, actor? Then go do your fucking job!”

Seriously. There was a hilarious interview with Cruise and Spielberg in Der Spiegel recently, reporting that there was a Scientology tent on the set of “War of the Worlds,” because in between shots Tom wanted to help people kick drugs and alcohol.

I can believe that. That’s fine; it’s sort of a way of life for Tom. It’s not really a charity. It’s more like his religion.

He’s got a reputation for it!

Yeah, he’s got a reputation for helping people. But my feeling is, “Shut up and act.”

So are you worried that you’re going to get any concerned calls from Gere, Nichols or Zellwegger about the book?

Nah, I haven’t gotten any calls yet, although the book pretty much just hit the stands. I really hope I don’t get in trouble with anyone, because I’m the dumbest guy in the book. By a country mile. Richard Gere is very calm and professional, Renée Zellwegger is really sweet, and Mike Nichols is completely reasonable. There just isn’t a section that goes, “And then Renée’s coke habit got totally out of control!” It’s fiction. It’s make-believe. They’re public figures, so as long as I’m not telling things out of school, we’re going to be fine. Lawyers crawl all over these kind of books, and no one’s mentioned it at all.

So how does one make love the Bruce Campbell way? My condensed take on the book seems to suggest that everyone is thinking way too hard to make love at all.

Yeah, there’s a lot of overanalyzing. If you’re bipolar, you’re bipolar forever, you know? We’ve come up with all these new terms, whether in medicine, relationships, whatever. And they’re all labels: You’re a recovering this, you’re a son of that. It’s horrible. I think everyone needs a clean slate.

That theory seems to be borne out in your imagined conversation with Liz Taylor about all her husbands. So is the idea — whether expressed in that conversation, the high jinks at Forest Lawn Cemetery, the section on Tyrone Power, and others — that your book is in part an homage to Hollywood’s past?

Yeah, because those people will soon be forgotten. You mention Tyrone Power to someone in their 20s and they go, “Who?” He was a guy who I first got exposed to during the time when movies were starting to come to television. I’ll take those old actors over some of the new guys, because they had so much experience. That’s how you get good. That’s how Spencer Tracy got so good. And most people today say, “Who’s Spencer Tracy?”

You and your wife Ida are making a documentary of land stewardship called “A Community Speaks.” Would you like to tell me about it?

We’re still editing it; it’s a monster. We’re trying to get it down to three hours. Where I live in southern Oregon, I’m surrounded by government land, whether it’s managed by the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service. Together, these two agencies manage probably about 200-300 million acres in the U.S. BLM, for example, usually takes care of the less desirable lands, so around 80 percent of Nevada is government land. Same with around 30-40 percent of Wyoming, Oregon and Utah. So the question is, what do you do with that land? I boil it down to a single watershed, the Applegate Watershed, which is located in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwestern Oregon. So it is a closed case study of the area and how it has traditionally been used by everyone from the pioneers and settlers to the miners and loggers.

It’s an examination of how we got here and where we go from here, how we use the land in the future. We weren’t financed by any group or cause, so we didn’t take any sides, which allowed us great access to everyone, because they didn’t think we were going to slant the doc one way or another. What we are struggling to do is look at the big picture and decide what is good or bad land stewardship. The face of the forests has changed dramatically in the last 75 years because of the decisions we have all made, and now the question is, Do we like our forests they way they are, whether they are clear-cut or overstocked with trees because nature hasn’t been allowed to burn them? What do we do? Do we go in manually? What do you cut? What do you leave?

Wait, is this another Healthy Forests initiative?

Yeah, you can get into that argument all day, because it’s a great title and all. If I was looking forward to some timber extraction, I’d call it the Healthy Forests initiative too. This current administration is going to get their wood out now.

Oh man.

Well, they are! For the first four years, they got hassled, but now that they’ve got another four coming up, it’s open season on the woods. They’ve already recently rescinded Clinton’s roadless provisions. Hopefully, the agencies will manage the extraction of lumber in a responsible way. But that’s basically what the documentary is about. We talked to die-hard environmentalists, we talked to unemployed loggers, all kinds of scientists. It was fun, like getting a Ph.D. in land stewardship. I’ve tried to apply what I have learned to my own land. Which species should be on the northern slope, which should be on the southern one? Fuel ladders, buck brush, manzanita. Names of trees I didn’t even know until a year after I got here.

Which, in a way, exhibits your philosophy rather well. Instead of getting an actual Ph.D. in land stewardship, you just went out and made a three-hour documentary about it and learned along the way.

That’s the cool thing about it. I’ve learned some filmmaking skills over the years, so I decided to use them to shed some light on a topic that thoroughly interests my wife and me. And we’re not too worried about what happens to it. Mainly, I’d like it to be used for educational purposes. We want to send it out to senators, colleges, students and the like.

OK, just a couple more on the entertainment tip. What was it like to work with the recently departed Ossie Davis on “Bubba Ho-Tep”? His passing wasn’t publicized as much as I thought it should have been.

He was terrific — and unflappable. He was in his 80s when we did “Bubba,” but he looked 65. It was crazy.

It was such a great role for him.

It was, and you know what? The biggest problem was getting the script to him. Movies are made sometimes in spite of Hollywood. Because the Hollywood procedure is, you submit the script to his agent, the agent gives it to the actor, and the actor reads it, especially if the film is already funded. You put an offer out to him. Well, his agents wouldn’t even give the script to Ossie. They thought it was this weirdo, low-budget cult film, so they didn’t give it to him. And the director was like, “You have to give it to him! The movie is financed. This is an offer. You have show it to your client.” And they were like, “No, we don’t.”

That’s lame.

And I’m not going to say that that was the exact wording, but basically they didn’t think it was worth it. So Don Coscarelli had to call another director who had worked with Ossie to get his number and said, “Look, I’m sorry to bug you about this, but I think we have a really good part for you.” And Ossie read it and said yes the next day.

Which is great, because you’re both hilarious in the movie and had amazing chemistry.

Well, it was really fun to work with him, because I always like to work with the old pros.

Yeah, this was a guy that delivered the eulogy at Malcolm X’s funeral.

No shit. Well, he also knew Kennedy, and there he was playing him in “Bubba.” Life is full of ironies.

I also wanted to talk about your upcoming film, “Man With the Screaming Brain,” seeing that you wrote the comic and are both directing and starring in the movie.

We can’t talk about a ridiculous movie like that.

Are you serious? It sounds like a blast. I love watching capitalists get their comeuppance.

Well, it’s basically a story of karma, and his comes back in a big way.

Is it an accident that the guy who gets his ass kicked by karma is a wealthy industrialist?

Well, those are guys that could learn some lessons. I’m a big fan of redemption. I like a character who is less of an asshole at the end of the film than he was at the beginning. It gives me hope. So “Man With a Screaming Brain” is a story of hope.

OK, so that just leaves us with the upcoming “Evil Dead” sequel and remake.

No, there’s no announcement for the sequel, but there is indeed a remake. We’ll probably get around to doing it at some point within the next few years. There’s no part for me, you know.

Yeah, I know.

I’m going to be the old guy that works at the bait store. “Hey, you kids be careful! I’ve heard stories about that cabin.”

Well, you’re going to have to be involved in some way or people are going to go nuts.

Look, when we made the first “Evil Dead,” no one cared or knew anything about anyone in the movie. We were five absolute nobodies. So there’s no problem with putting out more movies, which doesn’t mean that they’re all going to be about Ash and his buddies. It just is going to be an “Evil Dead” story with a bunch of new nobodies. It doesn’t matter. Or we’ll just get Ashton Kutcher and cover him with blood.

Well, it’s just amazing to think that, years ago, Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, who started out with the over-the-top horror classic “Dead Alive,” are now ruling Hollywood.

Yeah, those guys busted out. They went crazy.

Which says something about genre films like “Evil Dead” and “Bubba Ho-Tep,” which are perennially underrated even though they are some of the most lasting movies in existence.

Yeah, some of them are. But it just goes to show you that audiences aren’t as dumb as Hollywood thinks they are. A movie like “Evil Dead” can be crude, but it still is a handcrafted film, and there’s something about that that audiences really pick up on. Film truly is an opiate, so you have to make sure as an entertainer that you are feeding people the most potent and progressive opium. Sure, you’re distracting them from their daily lives, but for what purpose and with what film? That’s why I go for humor, because we really need it. This country is getting too serious. We need a return to irreverence. And I’m happy to carry the flag.

Woe to you atheists who used to love America for its eroding freedom from religion — we are fast becoming the minority round these parts. It’s God’s country; we’re just mining it for the black gold.

But let’s leave disturbing thoughts aside at this dawning of Bush’s new term; Armageddon may be headed our way, but damn if we’re going to let it ruin the new year. We’re already lessened by the loss of Sontag, a passing that was duly noted by Salon here and here. But few journalists have discussed the demise of Will Eisner, a comics colossus conventionally known as the father of the modern graphic novel and for whom the industry’s most prestigious award is named.

Eisner left us on Jan. 3, after succumbing to complications resulting from quadruple-bypass heart surgery, almost 70 years after co-founding the Eisner & Iger Studio (with Samuel “Jerry” Iger), which at one time counted superstar illustrator Jack Kirby and “Batman” creator Bob Kane among its ranks. Eisner’s comic noir series “The Spirit” inspired everyone from Alan Moore to Art Spiegelman to pick up a pen and enter the fray, but it is his 1973 comic “A Contract With God” that is widely credited with kick-starting the graphic novel game. As with any artistic enterprise, you’re going to have arguments (especially over Eisner’s period-bound ethnic stereotypes like Ebony White, African-American sidekick to the Spirit), but most will agree that Eisner is probably sitting at the head of the table in heaven — at least in the comics wing. For more on the massively influential artist, check out D.C.’s recently released “Will Eisner Companion” and its continuing “Spirit Archives” series. Long live the Spirit’s creator — and I don’t mean Jesus.

Let’s get to it.

“Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer”
Edited by Antonino D’Ambrosio
320 pages
Nation Books
Order from Powell’s

While we’re on untimely passings, let us have a moment of silence for one of global culture’s most commanding figures. Joe Strummer, although he might not like the comparison, was the John Lennon of the punk age. There were few bands as galvanizing and inspiring as the Clash to come out of the late ’70s and early ’80s sonic landscape, but memories are short in our reality TV metaverse, and his death in December 2002 was noted for about as long as our shortened attention spans can allow these days. Which is to say, not very long at all.

Which is where D’Ambrosio’s fine collection comes in. Less a hagiography than an earnest consideration of Strummer’s political views and life, “Let Fury Have the Hour” is a rewarding look back at the man who made The Only Band That Matters, well, matter. Leaping confidently from timeless screeds by Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs to appreciations from Chuck D, Kristine McKenna, Michael Franti, Tony Kushner, Tim Robbins and out into the more analytical work of Bad Subjects vets Charlie Bertsch and Joel Schalit, this potent collection ably communicates the hunger for social, cultural and racial justice that made Strummer’s work so engaging.

“I believe that Strummer certainly belongs alongside Dylan, Lennon and the rest of those musicians who were both music pioneers and political activists,” D’Ambrosio explained to me in a recent interview. “I also believe that among his peers Strummer stands alone. He remained a dedicated social justice and human rights activist; he never wavered from creating music rooted in multicultural or global rhythms while addressing important issues of peace and justice. For this reason, he deserves deeper scrutiny. There are very few musicians of his time — or any time — that have had such a tremendous influence on musicians throughout the world. Whether it’s America’s The Coup and Public Enemy, France’s Mano Negra, Italy’s Spaccanopli, Mexico’s Tijuano No!, Chile’s Desaparecidos or countless others in Africa, Asia and Europe, Strummer was a primary influence. And that was due to his unique sense of fusing a diverse music sensibility with radical politics.”

That desire to knit Marshall McLuhan’s global village together with music and civil liberties is what made the Clash’s deft mixture of punk, blues, reggae, dub, ska and more a real movement. But almost three decades after Strummer recorded “White Man in Hammersmith Palais,” the world still needs a few good men not interested in Ashlee Simpson’s latest manufactured mistake or George W. Bush’s Texas imperialism.

According to D’Ambrosio, Strummer saw this all coming. “Certainly, one can say that activists like Strummer are being vindicated by the rise of not only the religious right but of the far right, which seems to be more fascist in its tendencies. This underscores the importance of creating political popular culture that reaches many rather than a marginalized subculture that reaches only the few. With the Clash, Strummer was able to create music that was both entertaining and vitally political, message music that moved beyond the punk world and into the pop world, serving as a counterpoint to the dominant right-wing ideologies of Thatcher and Reagan. And now that Bush will serve a second term, there is more of a need for Strummer’s voice. He would be doing the best he could to initiate something to challenge what the Bush regime is doing. When I met him in April 2002, he was terribly distressed about the state of the world and Bush’s efforts at the time to march toward war and further destabilization. If he were alive today, he would be writing the new soundtrack to struggle, offering us an alternative to what Bush is doing.”

“Voices of a People’s History of the United States”
by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove
736 pages
Seven Stories Press
Order from Powell’s

“You can’t hide from the truth/
Because the truth is all there is.”
— Handsome Boy Modeling School, “The Truth”

Speaking of struggle, it should be conventional wisdom by now that the birth of America was no tea party, regardless of what went down in Boston. For every lily-white Republican that plasters 14 American-flag stickers to his ozone-chewing SUV, there are thousands of descendants of Native Americans, slaves, union members, leftists and more who carry the burn marks of America’s melting pot across their bodies. Not that we need to start the whole thorny reparations machine up and running; rather, a consensual acknowledgment of factual American history, and all its Manifest Destiny warts, would do fine, thanks. After all, as Rakim rapped in “The Ghetto,” “It ain’t where ya from, it’s where ya at.”

Problem is, too many Americans don’t even know where they’re “at,” literally speaking. They think that Columbus “discovered” America rather than Salvador, and that slave-owner George Washington never told a lie. It’s just part of our national pastime of creating histories and cultures on the fly, what literary critic Frank Lentricchia called the “desire for the universal third person … a new self [for] a New World.” No one’s blameless in this endeavor.

So high schools of the United States should not wait one second longer to add as compelling and indispensable a book as Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove’s “Voices of a People’s History of the United States” to their reading lists. Which might sound like a radical move, but only if you think that the hungry knowledge-seekers that populate the schools of America can’t handle the truth. In a country where a secretary of education, the woefully inept Rod Paige, calls the National Education Association a “terrorist organization” in the frenetic midst of a war on terror — while shelling out a cool quarter million to Armstrong Williams to pump up his hamstrung No Child Left Behind program — Zinn and Arnove’s potent collection is a much-needed wake-up call.

Plus, as Zinn told me in a recent interview, American schools are changing anyway — for the worse. “There is great pressure on the educational system to put the history of this country in a good light,” Zinn argues, “to omit the lies and massacres that accompanied American expansion. A few years ago, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution asking that history be taught in such a way as to inspire patriotism. The distortion of the past always comes from a point of view about the present, and a fear that the new generation will be skeptical of present official policy.”

“Our hope is the books like this will break through the solid wall of super-patriotism and give young people a realistic view of their government,” Zinn says. “They should understand that the interests of those in the White House are not the same as the interests of the citizenry, and that there is an admirable tradition of resistance to authority.”

The author is just as frustrated by Rod Paige’s ridiculous statement about the NEA (which Morphizm brutally satirized in a comic strip here, receiving much hate mail in the process, for those who want to check it out). “It reminds me of the Cold War ’50s,” Zinn confides, “when Congressman Himmel Velde of Illinois opposed funding mobile libraries for rural areas on the grounds that education led to communism.” Zinn’s earlier book “Declarations of Independence” features this mind-boggling quote from Velde that No Child Left Behind cheerleaders might want to chew over while they’re busy signing checks to Armstrong Williams: “Educating Americans through the means of the library service could bring about a change of their political attitude quicker than any other method. The basis of Communism and socialistic influence is education of the people.”

Let freedom ring.

Look, if research skills are still a necessity for any good college student, then this book is a great place to learn why. Those studying Columbus would do well to brush up on their Bartolome de Las Casas, who ably took notes while Columbus enslaved the unlucky natives he happened to come into contact with. Those infatuated with the ideological purity of the Founding Fathers — namely, every so-called Fox News expert — would learn a couple things from Benjamin Banneker, the child of a freed slave whose letter to Thomas Jefferson (who owned 83 slaves, by the way) illustrates the stark hypocrisy of a country that rebelled so violently and successfully against British oppression only to oppress, in turn, an entire race.

Zinn has some of his own favorites. “Some are unknown,” he explains, “like Harriet Robinson recalling with pride her first strike in the Lowell textile mills. Or the Rodriguez family writing to Bush after 9/11, arguing that their son, who died in the Twin Towers, wouldn’t want the U.S. to retaliate with violence. Or Yamaoka Michiko, who describes what it was like to be in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped. And then there are some well-known people who possess unknown points of view, like Helen Keller speaking out against war and militarism. Or Mark Twain, who denounced Theodore Roosevelt after the president congratulated an American general for the massacre of 600 men, women and children in the Philippines.”

Zinn has been carrying the torch for America’s hidden history ever since his now-canonical “People’s History of the United States” came out in 1980, but you’d still have a hard time knowing it if you were relying on CNN or Fox for your “news.” You’d be surprised how many people on your block have never heard of Zinn — or maybe not. With hundreds of pieces from voices as diverse as Thomas Paine, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Leonard Peltier, Michael Moore and many, many more, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States” should be required reading for every individual lucky enough to call America home. Even Paris Hilton.

“Attitude: Andy Singer, No Exit”
By Andy Singer
128 pages
Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing
Order from Powell’s

OK, now for some small disclosures. Unlike Armstrong Williams, I consider myself a serious journalist, even though I’m just as much of a small-time hack as he is — not to mention $240,000 poorer. But there are things that get my fires blazing, and one of them is the UC-Berkeley-based online journal “Bad Subjects,” which was noted in the piece on Joe Strummer above. I wrote a couple of essays for those unrepentant free-thinkers back in the late ’90s, although they read a bit amateur compared to the highfalutin crap I’m writing for Salon these days. In either case, my cameos with B.S. had nothing to do with my selection of “Let Fury Have the Hour” for this month’s column. That was more a result of my lazy perusal of Nation Books’ catalog. There, all disclosed. Are you happy now?

To get serious, what I really enjoyed during my time in Berserkeley was reading Andy Singer’s “No Exit” strip in UC-Berkeley’s Daily Californian newspaper, where it appeared from 1992 to 2001. So I was pleasantly surprised to get a follow-up from NBM Publishing on my last column exposing the best of America’s underground comic artists, notifying me that Singer’s estranged hilarity was getting its own book. Singer’s work has always pointed out the innate absurdities in everyday American life, but don’t think that his strip’s title is an homage to that father of absurdity, Jean-Paul Sartre.

“Actually, I just meant for the title to convey the idea that there’s no escape from the world,” Singer told me in a recent interview. “Whether it’s politics, relationships, business, money or whatever, you gotta face it. I found Sartre’s play cold and depressing — so much so that I was inspired to write a parody of it, where Garcin, Inez and Estelle have a massive orgy. It ends with Garcin drawing on the walls of the room with Estelle’s lipstick and realizing how happy he feels. Of the existentialists, I prefer Camus, who comes across as more compassionate.”

Singer himself is a compassionate guy, although he often goes on the attack in his “No Exit” panels. Of course, the usual targets — consumerism, militarism, arrogance, Bush-Cheney — get the darts, but, hey, they deserve it. My favorite Singer strips are those that unmask the irrationality of everyday life, like the one where a guy on a cellphone in a sea of cellphone-using citizens complains that he feels “isolated and alone.” Or another where a joyous rich man screams “Money buys freedom!” from behind a barbed-wire security fence panoptically decked out with video cameras and sunglass-wearing bodyguards.

Singer also possesses a Gary Larson-like ability to transmit the strangeness of humanity through the eyes of the animal kingdom, like the one where a dog complains to his analyst, “I have a fear of castration, my mother’s a bitch and I feel guilty for lying on this couch.” All in all, he’s a conscientious artist raging against the machines of hypocrisy and unilateralism, not an easy thing to do when you’re a starving cartoonist looking to make the papers.

“It’s a tough business,” Singer agrees. “There are talented people who are trying new things, but the magazine market has all but dried up. On the newspaper front, chains have a stranglehold on the nation’s dwindling supply. They take over a paper and turn it into a clone of every other one, so we have the same syndicated cartoons, columns and stories running in 90 percent of the newspapers in the country. It’s fast-food journalism based purely on economics.”

Speaking of Armstrong Williams and the Bush administration, er, I mean fast-food journalism, Singer — like many others — isn’t too optimistic about another four years of Republican rule. Although an incompetent, greedy administration allows Singer a wealth of material for his strips, he’d hand it in any day for some forward-thinking policy changes.

“What I worry about is the long-term social and environmental consequences of Bush’s policies. Denying that global warming exists won’t make it go away. Denying that oil is vanishing won’t help create alternative energy. There’s ‘no exit’ from this stuff.”

Unless it’s about Texas, where fragile egos bruise — a tad hypocritically, I would argue, considering all the trash they talk — at the slightest joke. That’s an angular jab at those who didn’t approve too much of my disappointment — OK, outright disbelief — over Don DeLillo’s archival papers getting shipped to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Katherine Pelletier, the archivist who worked hard to get the “White Noise” author’s goods to Austin, even wrote politely to inform me that no one in New York, DeLillo’s hometown, stepped forward to claim the author’s miscellany as its own, letting me know along the way that I unfairly “obliterate[d] the difference between those who treasure the lessons of history through art and literature and those who may wreak havoc on our culture.” And I thought no one read my column!

Another righteous dude from Austin told me off for the same transgression, arguing correctly that the city is a “bastion of liberalism” that “[my] kind” — by that, I suppose he meant people from Long Beach, Calif., like Snoop Dogg — think only exist north of the Mason-Dixon line.

I thought long and hard about both accusations — before falling asleep from the mental strain. Look, I have nothing but love for Pelletier and my Mason-Dixon heckler — after all, without Austin, Texas might descend into a gay-bashing, creationism-teaching, Clear Channel-owned, Halliburton-nurturing, oil-funded, red-state dystopia. Whoops, too late!

In all seriousness, cultural figures as diverse as Gibby Haynes, Richard Linklater, Jim Hightower, Mars Volta, And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, and many more go a long way toward redeeming Texas in my eyes — and they’ve received my undying loyalty, unwavering support and press coverage. But with a Texas-based administration screwing the nation out of the lives of its sucker-punched youth, waist deep in Iraq’s Big Muddy — not to mention trillions of dollars by the time 2008 rolls around — while sheltering unrepentant punks like Tom DeLay, Clear Channel, Kenneth Lay and countless more, you’ve got to cut me some slack for calling out the Lone Star faithful as red-state reactionaries. And remember, this is coming from a guy whose own state was taken over by the Terminator. (Yes, if you’re wondering, I am pissed off that the Texas Longhorns screwed my California Golden Bears out of a BCS bowl bid. But of course I’m a professional and that’s not affecting my attitude at all!)

“Eightball #23″
By Daniel Clowes
42 pages
Fantagraphics
Order from the publisher

Some of you might be sick of seeing Fantagraphics’ name in my column, but don’t kill the messenger. They continue to turn out some of the most compelling comic narratives of our time, including this 23rd installment of Daniel Clowes’ award-winning “Eightball” series.

This time around, “Eightball” focuses on a troubled boy named Andy who, after taking a drag on a cigarette offered to him by a troublemaking best friend named Louie, wakes up a superhero. But this isn’t “Spider-Man”; Andy’s troubled past and outcast pal Louie come back to haunt him. All hell breaks loose once Andy receives a working Death Ray gun in the mail, at which point Louie recruits his friend-turned-Superman to kill off the neighborhood crooks and bullies.

But like his “Ghost World” before it, Clowes’ latest comic is about the fragile nature of childhood friendships.

“There’s a certain sadness about them,” Clowes says in a phone interview. “Because I think that most of us never have friendships like that ever again. Having that one friend, where it’s the two of you against the world in high school, is a very intense thing. As you get older, you tend not to allow that to happen to yourself ever again, or you just don’t have the room for it in your life anymore. So there’s something much more interesting about those younger friendships, but they almost never last. You can’t really move on if you’re stuck in that. It’s very unlikely that the two of you are going to develop simultaneously.”

Clowes recently wrapped up shooting “Art School Confidential” with Terry Zwigoff, the director behind both the Oscar-nominated “Ghost World” and “Crumb,” not to mention the hilarious “Bad Santa.” The two have formed a mutually beneficial relationship, one that is propelling Clowes past the comics crowd and into mainstream recognition. But don’t think that the ex-Berkeley, Calif., resident (suck it, Texas!) is letting that go to his head.

“I’ve had [producers] ask about some of my other comics,” Clowes explains, “but really not in the way they would if they thought the comics were really commercial. I would have people beating down my door, in that case. The interest I get is tentative and uncertain, as if they’re not sure whether these are the kind of films they really want to pursue. I think that ‘American Splendor’ came about through a producer who was a big comics fan; he’s a guy I’ve known for many years and he was talking about doing that film since long before this trend emerged. ‘Ghost World’ was a very singular thing — that was just Terry trying to find a book he responded to, which just happened to be ‘Ghost World.’ Terry’s not really interested in comics, even though he gets deserved credit for being one of the guys who brought them into the mainstream. But beyond that, there has been some kind of interest here or there in my comics, but most of them will never turn into films.”

“The Originals”
By Dave Gibbons
160 pages
DC Comics
Order from Powells.com

As one of the brilliant minds behind DC Comics’ canonical “Watchmen,” Dave Gibbons is a one-man tour de force. He’s lent his pen to everyone from “Superman” and Batman to the “Matrix” and “Alien” franchises, to say nothing of collaborations he’s had with giants of the industry like Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Stan Lee.

But “The Originals” is one of his most personal works yet, a dystopian look back at Britain’s mod explosion, a cultural movement that claimed Gibbons when he was a teenager. A meaning-laden black-and-white comic centered around the exploits of Lel, who wants more than anything to get in with the colorful mod gang known as the Originals, Gibbons’ latest work explores, like Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” before it, that peculiar postwar U.K. environment that birthed everything from mod, punk and the Beatles to Maggie Thatcher’s conservative revolution. But Gibbons maintains that the Burgess comparisons end there.

“What I had in mind was not to duplicate ‘A Clockwork Orange’ or ‘Quadrophenia,’” Gibbons says. “But I guess that’s one of the inevitable things if you’re doing a book about disaffected youth who think they’re grown up but actually aren’t. Not to quote the Who or anything, but I think that my generation was really the first that didn’t have to fight in a war or at least perform military service. And I think that, in some ways, joining a youth gang is a substitute for that. You clearly want to identify with a group of people, you want to have something that’s not connected to the home, something that can give you your own adventures, ones that have nothing to do with your childhood environment. Certainly, I remember Britain in the ’50s as being drab and gray, and it is that kind of austere backdrop that causes colorful fads to start to shine.”

As always, sex and violence rule the roost in youth culture, and “The Originals” is filled with both. But it’s not exploitative or transgressive — as we’ll see later with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s new “Son of the Gun” collection, also out from DC. If anything, it is the escalating gang violence of “The Originals” that signals the end of Lel’s innocence, as well as that of his favorite subculture. And all it takes is one gun.

“A gun was unheard of,” Gibbons says, “certainly amongst these gangs back in the ’60s. Of course, you’re nobody now if you’re in a gang and don’t carry a gun, but in those days a gun would be a most unusual thing to have. In my whole lifetime of being a mod, I rarely ever saw anyone with a knife. Most of the violence in those days was of the short-lived brawl variety. But one of the things I wanted to do in ‘The Originals’ is show what happens when violence does get out of hand, when it turns from being a boyish schoolyard fight to palpable violence where people die and their lives are irrevocably altered. I certainly never murdered anybody!”

“Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists”
Edited by Ted Rall
127 pages
Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing
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Cartoonist/columnist Ted Rall has spent the last several years calling bullshit on the power brokers that have been running this country into the ground. This second anthology of up-and-coming or established alternative cartoonists is Rall’s love letter to the genre that has brought him to prominence.

“For years, I’ve been frustrated at the lack of attention generated by this genre of alternative weekly-based political and social satire cartoonists,” Rall explains over the phone, “which has been around pretty much since the late ’80s and early ’90s. And it’s true that you can argue that not all them are social or political cartoonists, or even in alternative weeklies — most of my clients are in dailies, actually — but there are certain things these comics have in common. They tend to be drawn by a certain age group; Generation X is certainly the wellspring of the first or second wave of the alt-weekly cartoonists. They feature stripped-down or abstracted drawing styles to convey complicated ideas; for that reason they tend to be wordy, text-based exercises. And since I work in that genre, I love it but am endlessly frustrated by the lack of exposure it gets. This stuff always falls between the cracks.”

Unless you’re there to catch it, which some, like Salon and other forward-looking publications, are. But no matter how much indie cred artists like David Rees, Keith Knight and Aaron McGruder receive for their outstanding work, there are toiling cartoonists like Tak Toyoshima, Emily Flake and Max Cannon who may never get the credit they deserve. Which is where Rall comes in.

“Here you have intelligent and funny comics being ignored because no one yet has pulled it all together as a genre,” Rall added. “That’s one reason why I felt these cartoonists had a hard row to hoe, because people need to have genres, to be able to categorize things. If it’s something you’ve never seen or heard before, it doesn’t fit anywhere. So the goal of the first book was to say there’s strength in numbers, and it did much better than I or my publisher ever expected. But this was before 9/11, so in a way the scene we were documenting changed right as we were putting the book to bed.” Ergo, the new book, which features interviews with the aforementioned, as well as 15 more budding Matt Groenings, many of whom deserve to be stars already.

“In the Shadow of No Towers”
By Art Spiegelman
42 pages
Pantheon
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I already covered Spiegelman’s massive rumination on 9/11 — and the terrorism gold rush it inspired — earlier this year. But memories are short. How else did a war against WMD become a campaign to spread peace and freedom? Spiegelman’s book should be a collector’s item soon, but that would be sad indeed. Most of the strips he created for the book were offered to high-profile publications that nixed them, for fear of stirring whiskey into John Ashcroft’s coffee. Wimpy bastards. Next to Peter Kuper’s “World War 3 Illustrated,” Spiegelman’s visually arresting release is the most damning indictment of U.S. policy and arrogance committed to paper this year.

“The Jungle”
By Peter Kuper
48 pages
NBM/ComicsLit
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Speaking of Kuper, he has rendered Upton Sinclair’s tragic story of Jurgis Rudkus and the Chicago meatpacking industry in harrowing colors — and just in time. With rampant corruption and multinational greed reaching an all-time high, the world could stand to read up on Sinclair’s socialist tracts, especially those that rail against corporate crime and hypocritical religious orders. Here Kuper mashes Soviet-era propaganda art with Picasso’s “Guernica” and more for a captivating peek into the world of those much less fortunate than you. The way things are going in the world right now, that contingency will grow by leaps and bounds. Don’t sleep on this one.

“McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue 13″
Edited by Chris Ware
263 pages
McSweeney’s
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This gargantuan edition of Dave Eggers’ continuing promotion of all that is strange and good in literature and the arts is stacked to the spine with knockout artists, most of whom are already household names. Guest editor Chris Ware (“Jimmy Corrigan”) has compiled some heady material for this hard-to-find (at least the last time I checked) collection, including excerpts from Joe Sacco’s “The Fixer,” Art Spiegelman’s “In the Shadow of No Towers,” Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s “Love & Rockets,” and much more, as well as some vintage toss-offs like Charles Schulz’s early “Peanuts” scribblings. Way more wine-and-cheese than Rall’s macaroni-and-cheese compilation, “McSweeney’s 13″ is a capable introduction to the finest of what the contemporary comic set has to offer, although you’re not likely to find too many unknowns. But the edition’s astounding visual and textual arrangements are reward enough for the fairly steep price. Get it for those adult-alternative snobs who still think comics are for losers.

“Son of the Gun: Sinner”
By Alejandro Jodorowsky
112 pages
Humanoids/DC Comics
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Yeah, it might be DC Comics, but “Superman,” this ain’t. Unless the caped crusader is a South American street orphan born with a tail, raised by a transvestite/prostitute dwarf and suckled by a dog, that is. The infamous Alejandro Jodorowsky more or less created the midnight movie circuit with the hard-to-stomach 1970 cult western known as “El Topo,” before scaring the living crap out of deviant moviegoers everywhere with the twisted “Santa Sangre” and “The Holy Mountain.” He’s done the same in his various sci-fi comics like “Metabarons” and “Technopriest.” “Son of the Gun” has much more in common with Brian De Palma’s now-canonical film “Scarface” than with “Heavy Metal.” There is so much conscienceless violence — especially against women — in “Son of the Gun” that you’d be forgiven for tossing the book out the window. But Jodorowsky has built his guts ‘n’ gore rep on worse, and those hardboiled fans who think that Takeshi Miike’s films are just what Dr. Feelgood ordered will feel right at home here. For strong stomachs only.

“Locas: A Love & Rockets Book”
by Jaime Hernandez
780 pages
Fantagraphics
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In my own haughty opinion, this is the release of the year (see my Salon piece on Jaime for more on that score). Compiling more than 20 years of material from Los Bros. Hernandez’s pioneering “Love & Rockets” series, “Locas” follows the bisexual Maggie Chascarillo as she tries to find herself in the burgeoning Southern California punk rock scene. On the way, she also find Hopey Glass, a rebellious kindred spirit, and the two spend the rest of this massive tome simultaneously trying to escape and reconcile with each other. There are few comics that conscientiously attempt to represent alternative sexuality, and few authors in the genre as revered as Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. If you’re going to grab one book from this list for yourself, grab this one.

Those who’ve been paying attention to the legitimization of comics over the last 20 years understand the importance of the pioneering hybrid of comics and fiction in “Love & Rockets,” which began before marketers had invented the category of “graphic novel.” If the 19th century belonged to the novel, the 20th century might have belonged to the comic book, a hypothesis supported by the billions raked in from various cinematic adaptations of canonical comics franchises like “Batman,” “Superman,” “Spider-Man” and “The Hulk,” along with more esoteric offerings like Daniel Clowes’ “Ghost World” and Harvey Pekar’s “American Splendor.”

Art Spiegelman and Alan Moore are more famous than the Hernandez brothers, and have enjoyed a level of crossover success “Love & Rockets” will never see. But both those artists would be happy to acknowledge Los Bros.’ importance; it was Moore who introduced “Love & Rockets” to some ex-members of ’80s goth-rock outfit Bauhaus, who ripped off the name for their new band. That’s still a sensitive subject for Jaime, Gilbert and Mario — but then again, they’re still here, writing and drawing new work, while the Love & Rockets CD catalog is chilling somewhere in the dustbin of music history.

Comics publisher Fantagraphics has compiled the various “L&R” series created over the last two decades, separated them by author, and released them in gorgeous hardback editions. In 2003, Gilbert claimed the spotlight when Fantagraphics released “Palomar” — a collection of his stories centering on the eponymous Central American town and the interconnected lives of its inhabitants. The newest edition is Jaime Hernandez’s sprawling “Locas,” a 700-plus-page tome (the biggest Fanta has ever published) about two friends-cum-lovers named Maggie Chascarillo and Hopey Glass, rebellious gals who strive to define themselves against the socioeconomic and sexual pressures of the fictional Hoppers 13 barrio and end up in love. (Thanks to our pals at Fantagraphics, here’s a sample page from “Locas.”)

“Locas” is as much a treatise on Southern California’s seemingly insurmountable race, gender and class divide as it is a journey of self-discovery for two women looking for Mr. — or Ms. — Goodbar. Jaime’s early entries in the saga feature an epistolary relationship between the two heroines, amid adventures with space travel and dinosaurs, but Maggie and Hopey soon ditch their more fantastical sci-fi exploits for the real life of SoCal’s burgeoning punk scene. Channeling the music’s anti-authoritarian energy, the duo find a vehicle for their various frustrations and desires, eventually forming an inseparable bond that sustains them until the end of “Locas,” as they are carted off together in the back of a police car.

Like Gabriel García Márquez, to whom they’re frequently compared, the Hernandez brothers find the immanent transcendent in the drudgery of everyday life. “Love & Rockets” is sort of the “One Hundred Years of Solitude” of bisexual punk-gal comic books. Whatever the academics and comics cheerleaders eventually decide their place in literary history may be, Jaime Hernandez and his brothers have poured their hearts and heads into the personal tragicomedies of “Love & Rockets” since 1981. Fantagraphics published the 50th and last issue of “L&R” Vol. 1 eight years ago, and Los Bros. are now 12 issues into Vol. 2, with no signs of slowing down. Jaime Hernandez spoke to me from his Los Angeles home.

Why did you decide to pull the stories in “Locas” out and create a separate volume?

Fantagraphics did my brother’s book last year, so I guess it was my turn! I had a body of work that would be fun to see all in one place, so you didn’t have to jump from volume to volume trying to figure out what’s going on. You get the straight story all the way through. I was kind of sad about this book, however. I couldn’t put everything in it. I had to leave out stories of other characters that I thought were good material. But the book just would have been too fat.

What do you think the stories of Maggie and Hopey bring to the “Love & Rockets” universe?

Well, when I was a teenager, I was still doing superhero comics for myself, trying to create a universe of characters. I noticed that I really got into character interaction, people just talking and bouncing off each other, getting hot and cold — and I wanted to create two characters like Maggie and Hopey that I could do that with forever, who could talk about anything. As their characters progressed, my whole universe revolved around them. Because that’s what interested me most in storytelling: characterization.

What was the force driving you to pour yourself into these two characters?

I don’t know. When I first started doing it, I didn’t really think about it. I just thought, they’re two friends. They have fights, they get along, they back each other up. I just wanted my own Charlie Brown, my Betty and Veronica, my Batman. My own characters that would one day stand right next to Charlie Brown and Lucy, that kind of thing. But, you know, I wasn’t holding my breath. I was thinking, Well, it’ll be fun trying.

How does it feel now, 20 years down the road?

I’m pleased. I’m also happy that I was young enough to find what I wanted right away, instead of having to struggle and finally get it when I’m 35. I’m also glad that it took off as early as it did, so I could have time to build on it.

One of the things I love about “Love & Rockets” is that it’s about families, not simply meaning blood relations but your “family,” regardless of whether they’re related to you or not. Which is only accentuated by the fact that you worked with your brothers.

Family has always played a big role in “Love & Rockets.” I hung out with my brothers and my sister as much as I hung out with my friends. And in Mexican or Latino culture, family is a big deal, which is why we have gangs, who are basically families of a sort protecting each other while killing the other families in town. So it’s something that’s natural to me.

Do members of your family, or other people you know, see themselves in “Love & Rockets”?

Yeah. When we self-published our first issue and were showing it to friends, I can’t remember how many people told me, “Maggie, that’s me. I’m Maggie.” OK, whatever. (Laughs.)

Did you take story lines from your family and friends?

Yeah, but I changed the names to protect the innocent! But yeah, that happened. Or I would be getting drunk one day with my friends and they’d tell me an amazing true story that happened about a guy they knew at work or somewhere who did this or that. I would steal some of that. When you realize that real life is more fun than art, that’s when you’ve got to stop and say, “Hey, wait a minute.”

Did you have any problems writing your narrative from a female perspective? I mean, you’re a guy.

I just went for it. It just seemed cool at the time. I guess it goes back to when I was a teenager, drawing my superheroes. It wasn’t long before I wanted to create female heroes, before I wanted to draw a girl in tights. (Laughs).

But seriously, do you have a sense of how ambitious that was?

I think about it. Sometimes I think, Why were we one of the first? That shit should have never been ignored, but you can say that with everything. Women couldn’t vote years ago; we think about that now and it seems ridiculous.

Were you worried about alienating anyone? Or were you comfortable with the fact that these were the stories of people you knew who lived in alternative communities and didn’t abide by the dominant culture?

Pretty much the second part. I’ve known people like Maggie and Hopey. The only thing that made me nervous was approaching types that I didn’t know much about. I deal with lesbians and I’m not a lesbian, so I can’t really jump inside and tell the whole story. I have to be very careful about where I go. I cannot make things up. So instead of concentrating on lesbian stereotypes, I decided to just treat them like a person. It’s pretty simple. Maybe that’s why it seems natural.

Did you catch any heat from lesbians for Maggie and Hopey’s relationship?

I heard things like, “Lesbians don’t do it that way.” But I can’t listen to that argument, because it’s just as much a stereotype. I’m sure there’s someone out there who does it the way I wrote it — for lack of a better way of putting it. (Laughs.) If you can think of it, someone’s already done it. If you think of a way to kill someone, someone’s already done it.

“Love & Rockets” dealt at length with Los Angeles’ subculture, but people all over the nation responded to it. It gave readers a chance to escape the dominant culture’s stereotypes and to see L.A. in a different light.

Well, you and I grew up in Southern California, so we know what it’s like. We’ve seen the ins and outs, the ups and downs. But most of the country and the world hasn’t. They only know “Baywatch” or “The O.C.” and the dominant culture is still trying to sell that: SoCal, the Gold Coast. And believe me, I saw a lot that had nothing to do with that. Which made it easy to write “Love & Rockets,” because there is so much about Los Angeles that people don’t want to talk about. I grew up a Mexican-American, but I grew up a rock ‘n’ roller too, so I saw my culture split in half. I saw the guys who couldn’t relate to my music and then I saw people who like my music but who couldn’t relate to my culture. So I was lucky that I was able to step outside of all that and look at it all. I got to watch everyone around me doing shit. Instead of my culture looking at their culture, I got to see everyone’s culture — and it’s not what TV is telling us.

You’ve been an “alternative” comics artist for 20 years. Have you outgrown that, now that you’ve published this huge $50 volume that might end up on Alec Baldwin’s coffee table?

It’s fine with me. Because I know where it all came from. It came from my drawing board and there was no compromise. If, say, Alec Baldwin likes it, well, I didn’t lie. He’s getting the same story that the alternative kids are getting.

How do you feel about the way alternative subcultures inevitably get appropriated? You’ve been watching it happen for a long time.

I have to admit that I get cranky when some “normal” person off the street starts talking about the legendary Sex Pistols. Everyone knows now who the Sex Pistols are. Everyone knows now who the Ramones are — and they’re all experts. But did they put their asses on the line, leave their homes every day with stupid haircuts, willing to die for their music? No. But you could say that about a lot of things. I don’t usually like to talk about it — but, yeah, I get annoyed.

It’s a much more nebulous pop-culture landscape than when you were coming up, isn’t it? It’s hard to find something to rebel against when everything has been packaged for you, whether it’s punk, hip-hop or whatever.

Right. It’s all packaged, and there are few secrets left. I guess I’m lucky. I’m old now and not as energetic and fiery as I once was. I mean, I still have my anger, but now it’s all channeled through my pen or in more subtle ways. But when I was a youngster, I used to go out and, um … make my mark. (Laughs.)

Are you uncomfortable with being incorporated into the underground comics boom?

I’m uncomfortable with being fucked over. Or with “Love & Rockets” being put through a strainer and coming out “Friends.” Of course I’m weird about that. But there are parts of my work that I don’t know will ever be accepted, because — and this is a real big argument — much of it is my culture. And I don’t know if my culture will ever be accepted. After 45 years I’ve just seen what’s going to get through and what’s not. The rest of it has to stay in the subculture. Which is fine, as long as you’re allowed to have one.