Benjamin Chandler | The Columbian Museum of Natural History
The Flak Comics Interview
By James Norton

FLAK: Word. I love GrandCentral so much.

BENJAMIN CHANDLER: Although you sound like a Cylon kind of.

FLAK: Oh do I? I don't think I typically do...

BC: [laughs]

FLAK: I'm blaming the cell towers. Not the website or my voicebox. Alright. What are you doing to pay the bills these days?

BC: I'm a kindergarten teacher. Actually, preschool. I mean the rest of the world would call it preschool but in Illinois they call it junior kindergarten. I do that in the morning and this year I'll be teaching art for the rest of the school in the afternoon.

FLAK: I've known you since college, and I would definitely describe you as one of the funniest dudes that I know. But the Columbian Museum of National History, let's talk about that first. It's dry, it's elegant, it's less about a punchline than evoking a lost world that never existed. What was the appeal of that strip for you? You did more than a hundred of them, right?

BC: Yeah, yeah I think I did more than a hundred. There's always a little voice in my head that says, you know, its time to go back to that. The main appeal was this: I collect old natural history books from the turn of the century and I love the illustrations in them. And really it was just an excuse for me to do a drawing, to make sure I did one drawing once a week and just try to make it a good drawing and just sort of mimic the style of writing and artistic look that those old books had. It never really was meant to be funny, it was just supposed to be curious and interesting and kinda cool. That sorta thing. That was the main idea behind it.

FLAK: When you started working on those drawings, would you take something from nature and modify it a little bit, or would you just often go out of completely out of whole cloth and draw it right out of your head?

BC: You know what, sometimes it was both things. There were a lot of things where I would think: "Well, what's an animal I haven't drawn in a while? I haven't done a fish, so maybe it's time I do a fish-type creature." Sometimes maybe just a conversation I had during the week or something I had seen in nature or something I had read in a book or, you know, whatever, would kind of be the impetus, and other times I would just kinda sit down and think: "What would be the weirdest, grossest thing I could do," and it just kinda went from there.

FLAK: Right on. You've sort of switched over to an Interlude with Starlings, which has been good and irregularly published. Where'd the idea for that strip come from, and is that something you're gonna keep running with or do you want to shift back to Columbian Natural History?

BC: [Interlude] started as... I was actually teaching a lesson about sequential art to this girl that I tutor privately, and while she was working on something, I thought, well, I don't wanna just sit here at the kitchen table, so I took out a scrap of paper and started doodling these birds. I had done an artist's book not too long ago called Sparrows and Starlings. I took pictures of the birds around my neighborhood and drew them and then wrote questions that I wanted to ask them that were usually very kind of pithy, you know, philosophical kinds of questions.

About, you know, the meaning of life, that sorta thing. So, I still had those birds on my brain and I mean, here in Chicago starlings are everywhere and growing up in the suburbs — I never saw them, so it's this unique bird for me here in the city, you know. They mimic other bird songs and they have these long drawn out songs that can go on for minutes on end and they change their plumage with the seasons and things like that... a lot of bird watchers would probably call them garbage birds because they're so, you know, constant, but they're really curious.

So I wanted to keep playing with drawing these birds that I see around the neighborhood. I wanted, I've always planned on introducing other birds, aside from the starlings. I want to do a strip where there's the king of the grackles, and another one with a bird stuck in a birdcage, that just kinda lives in his birdcage in the middle of a field and it was more to invoke just sort of like, these curious little moments. It's kind of funny but it isn't meant for people to you know, be more than just amused by it.

FLAK: Do you ever hunger for doing Garfield? I mean, doing a sequential strip with a punchline? Does that intrigue you at all or are you just completely past that in terms of what catches your interest as an artist?

BC: You know, every once in a while I think that I'd like to do that again, I think that Codex Errata was kind of along those lines. I mean out of all the strips I've done for Flak, that was the one that most had the ba-DUMP-dum kinda thing at the end.

FLAK: Going for the laugh.

BC: Yeah, exactly. I don't want to say that I'm beyond that, because there are some really good strips out there that follow that kind of thing with the punchline at the end, and I would say there's a whole lot more that are horrible.

FLAK: What are some of the ones that work for you? I mean which ones do you dig in that vein?

BC: Oh, you know. While I was saying that sentence I thought: "He's gonna ask me which ones I like and I'm not gonna be able to answer that." And I even read the Sunday comics today and was like: "sucks, sucks, sucks." You know ... honestly I can't think of one off the top of my head.

FLAK: I guess old Peanuts.

BC: Well, Peanuts. Everybody likes Peanuts. I really like the Far Side, a lot, and granted that was only a one-panel strip but I think that one still holds up. I recently read — this is gonna make me sound really bitter and jaded and hated by all eight people that read my interview — but I recently read some Calvin and Hobbes stuff, and I sat there and I thought: "Well, this is really well drawn and really cute, but I don't know why I thought it was so awesome when I was a kid." Maybe it spoke to me at a different, what's the word?

FLAK: Sensibility?

BC: Yeah, thank you very much, that's exactly the word I'm looking for.

FLAK: Yeah, I think part of that may just be also that it was breaking a lot of ground that now feels broken. I had this experience where I watched The French Connection which has a reputation for being a really great important, groundbreaking, awesome film, and I thought: "This is the most boring, lame film ever."

It's just cops doing a car chase and jumping their cars over other cars and shooting at robbers it just seemed really hackneyed and dull and then I thought: "Wait a second: This is the early '70s and this is one of the films that made up the action movie conventions that every Die Hard film has observed religiously since."

So in a sense it's like Speed when Speed first came out and it was an amazing, mind-blowing film and then ten years later it's so elementary that it bores the hell out of you. Not that Calvin and Hobbes is boring or bad — because I think it's great — but you can break ground and then later you look back and you're not sure why you were so excited about something.

BC: Yeah, you know, I don't wanna say that I don't appreciate it any more because like I said, the drawing is gorgeous and the jokes are sound... It's just for some reason it doesn't speak to me anymore. And maybe that has to do with what does speak to me now versus what did when that strip ran. Well, that was like late '80s / early '90s.

FLAK: Actually thats a good transition, I was going to ask you if there's any cartoonists working now, I mean peers, on or off Flak, who you follow or admire and why?

BC: You know, I gotta say, this is like my secret confession, a couple years ago I got really angry at comic books in general and was like: "Not looking at them again!" You know all the poncey underground people doing all their moody stuff...

I'm not even going to say names because that would be unprincipled, but you know, along the lines of: "Oh, my girlfriend broke up with me," or: "What am I doing here," kinds of things.... "My parents are horrible" kinda things. And those are all things that need to be said... but sometimes I felt like really they're only doing these comics to say those things and they're not taking it beyond those thoughts.

In my mind what really makes something quality is that there's something more than what's just on the surface. Granted, you know, I'm not saying that my strips are like frickin' reading Jean Paul Sartre or Faulkner or something like that, but I don't think i'm going for those sorts of, "I'm trying to say something" kind of things. Just making these amusing things. If I wanted to say something deeper, and occasionally I do, then I go for other media. You know, I write poems or work on stories or abstract wall paintings, paper, kinda things.

Going back to your question, I still love Mike Mignola, you know, I still love... uh... just him.

There's other guys out there but they just don't do work anymore! I'd love to say Mark Schultz, who did Xenozoic Tales but he just writes Prince Valiant now and I don't get the paper so I don't raed Prince Valiant. I guess I'm just more interested in, I don't know, fine arts. Not trying to draw the distinction between comics and art but you know what I'm saying. Looking at Vermeer teaches me more about expressing something and creating a mood and showing emotions than were I to go and read the latest about what's goin' on with Flash.

FLAK: Yeah, Vermeer was pretty good. You spent a lot of time this summer working on a novel, can you tell me a little bit about what that's about and how that process has treated you?

BC: A couple years ago I, on a whim, thought, I'm gonna try the NaNoWriMo thing. I've written some short stories in grad school but I've never written something as long as a novel, so let's see if I can do it.

So I started writing and got to about 10,000 words and then my parent/teacher conferences happened. At that point, I had to focus on being able to talk about the children to their parents, so I put it down for a little bit more than a year, and at the time I just said: "Okay, I'm just gonna write nothing that has any kind of depth, nothing that reveals anything about nature or the human condition. It's just gonna be... what do I know, I know dinosaurs. So it's going to be a time travel story where the guy gets lost in dinosaur time. There we go!"

FLAK: Is it a comic novel or is it a serious novel?

BC: It's serious. I mean, there really are funny moments so one might think it was funny, but it's nice to be like a serious adventure kind of thing.

FLAK: Is it a throw back to the 1950s era of great pulp go-back-in-time-and-meet-with-dinosaurs style kinda writing?

BC: Half of it is kinda that pulpy kinda thing, you know, and the other half is more sorta trying to be philosophical about things the characters are thinking. Whether you can change time or what would you change if you could. And there's a conflict between some groups in terms of whether time can be changed or not and what that implies for what free will is and that sort of thing.

And there's also a personal element of the story. The main character who gets lost, growing from being you know very introverted and reactive to being more proactive in his life. And not letting the world happen to him but trying to make it, that sorta thing. You know, who knows, I'm at 40,000 words now, so I'm about 15-20,000 words away from it being novel length, so we'll see.

My hope is that by next summer, maybe I'll have it all done, and edited and beautiful, and I can shop it around. You offered to read it, so I thought maybe when I did a few touchups that some friends of mine have suggested, I'll send it over to you and see what you think about it.

FLAK: Yeah, I'd love to read it. I find as I get older, I get less and less kind in the way I edit things.

BC: Be nasty.

FLAK: And that actually makes it much more useful to people. I found that holding back in that perspective just doesn't help people. Actually, when people say stuff like that: "Be nasty to me or be mean to me," you never need to frame feedback in a nasty way.

When people send comics to Flak and say: "I wanna be on the Flak Comics page" and they just don't work out for whatever reason, it's never my ambition to be cutting about it. I think being really honest and just saying: "Look, this aspect of it isn't working for whatever reason and maybe you agree and maybe you don't, but here's my honest feedback" really helps people."

The older I get the more comfortable I am just kinda dishing that shit out and feeling okay about it, feeling like I'm actually helping people by being more blunt and also if you can't take it, then screw you.

BC: Yeah, don't ask for it.

FLAK: Right, if all you want is praise, then you shouldn't be pretending that you're looking for editing. But yeah, I'd love to read it, I'm looking forward to it. Another question for you, I think you're got one of the most craft-intensive styles of any of Flak's cartoonists, I mean you do a lot of drawing drawing and it's detailed and it often captures the way things actually look in real life sometimes. I'm wondering, do you ever read comics like Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics or Pixel... I mean, what's your take on the comics that don't raelly use any actual crafted art but are sort of more computer generated or computer rendered?

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