Rodney Pruitt | Public House
The Flak Comics Interview
By James Norton

In August 2007, Flak Magazine invited the artists from its Comics page to talk about their work.

Regular readers know that Rodney Pruitt's Public House hews to few of the conventions of online cartooning. Its visual style is loose but artful, evoking Krazy Kat before suggesting Achewood or Penny Arcade. Its writing is poetic, circular, often abstract, rarely building toward a punchline. It usually warily circles a mystery, or beats fruitlessly through the emotional underbrush in search of answers. Pruitt's work rewards a closer reading, but it's beautiful enough to pleasantly bemuse even the casual reader.

Flak: So where are you right now, in terms of what city? I know you're in a transitional situation where you're moving, new job and all that, so just give us a quick recap.

Rodney Pruitt: I'm in Greensboro, North Carolina, in between the mountains and the beach — right in the center, about two hours from each. I've got nice hot summers and nice cold winters and all that, but like you said I just got a new job and I'm gonna move out to Seattle.

Flak: Do you have any predictions on whether a cross-country move will influence your style and your habits? Have you moved around a lot in the past, or is this a big leap for you?

RP: I think it will definitely affect the strip — I don't know exactly how. Hopefully it won't get more depressing with all the rain. Everybody keeps reminding me of the high suicide rate in Seattle, so things will probably go downhill... nah. Actually I think it's gonna be good. I'll have more time since I'm leaving all my friends, so I can really focus on a lot of things I've been thinking about doing in the strip.

Flak: What are you hoping you can kind of bear down on, with a little more opportunity to concentrate?

RP: I guess what I want to do is focus more on the characters and their growth and their transformation. And I want to put some new characters into their environment and have things happen outside the pub. Right now they're kind of in an abandoned industrial district and that's really the only place that I show, and I want to break out of that.

Flak: Do you see your characters as stand-ins for particular points of view from a philosophical perspective, or are they merely characters, or do they lay somewhere in between those two positions?

RP: I think they're a hybrid of stand-ins for different emotions, and at the same time, they're immature characters on their own. I want to give them a little more definition. Creatures unto themselves instead of just my different emotions.

Flak: Well, walk me through the characters and what they've meant so far?

RP: When I first thought about doing the strip, I started out with the thoughts of Freud — with the superego and the id and the ego — and I was gonna do a strip of three characters bouncing off each other in somebody's mind. There was just so much freedom there, it was almost like doing something that was fake. It was just crippling trying to decide where to start, and I'm not that big of a fan of Freud anyway, so I went away from that, and a trip to England with my friend made me really fall in love with the pub. And I already loved beer, so the pub turned into a perfect nexus point to throw characters into. The characters started to grow out of the original ego, id, and superego where a pig, Piggins — I always thought of myself as a pig, always wanting things and having sexual desires — is dealing with his own selfishness and his own emotions all the time. And Newt is a more detached, slightly more logical and lifeless creature that worries about how he looks and what he buys. The third character is Beer Fish, who is a very underdeveloped character so far — basically, he's a fish who lives in a bowl of beer who comes out every now and then and emits something philosophical.

Flak: It's interesting you mention that sort of tripartite character model. One of the best analyses of the original Star Trek series is that of the id, ego and superego with of course Kirk as id, Spock as ego, and McCoy as superego and the conscience — the three of them bouncing off one another. Freud is very unfashionable and probably has been for 60 or 70 years, but I think there is something very compelling about that metaphor for the way we process our lives and wrestle with decisions that we have to make.

RP: Something interesting that runs counter to the Freudian aspect is a spiritual side, a more Jungian kind of psychology where we have a public consciousness and there are certain types of things that all people feel and think. That came out a lot more recently with some of the religious topics, where the different characters are floating along in a philosophical state where they're wondering about their own existence.

Flak: Is that the conversation or problem that's at the heart of the strip?

RP: Yeah, that's part of the stuff that comes out through me, through the characters — "Why am I here?" All those simple questions that everyone asks their whole life — "Why am I here? Why do I want this? Why do I feel this way?" But at the same time, recently I've tried to add a little bit of warmth to the strip, because even though all of my struggles come out in the artwork, there's a lot of warmth there underneath, and I want that to show, also. Because, you know, day to day I'm pretty happy.

Flak: What got you started as a cartoonist? Did you have any kind of earlier or even childhood influences that really informed the way you write and/or draw?

RP: Yeah, probably the earliest influences were Maurice Sendak — Where the Wild Things Are — and Dr. Seuss. They're totally different styles, but maybe the freeness of Seuss's drawing mixed with some of the things Harvey Kurtzman did as an artist and as a writer, kind of blur together to form a lot of my inspiration. And also the scratchy drawing of George Herriman and even Watterson, to a point. Going out from there, I like blues as a medium, a framework to string thoughts along to, where everybody can share the same medium but express themselves, no matter who they are. Probably as far as writers, there are a lot of influences, but Don DeLillo is really big.

Flak: I was actually going to ask you what the appeal of cartooning as a medium is, and maybe you just answered it — that it's got conventions that everyone within it understands and riffs off of?

RP: Yeah, I think that's very important. Cartooning in the last hundred years has developed to the point where you have a toolbox — and it's gonna grow a lot as we go into the next century with electronic media — but we've got this awesome toolbox to work from, where you can deal with just about any thought that comes to mind, and it's an amazing toolbox, it almost to me exceeds anything that movies or music has, or any other kind of artwork.

Flak: There's almost unlimited freedom — if you can conceive it mentally, you can make it happen in an illustration. And it can be even more vivid and specific than writing. What you can do in one panel might take me, if I was doing creative writing, 400 words or 250 words, and even then I'll be limited. It's hard to impart what shading is, or what an exact expression of a face is, but you can do that with an illustration.

RP: And there's a lot of things now that you can do with comics as they grow out of the newspaper that you haven't been able to do before, where you're mixing some things from other mediums. Like you can have sound now, and animation, and the definition of a comic has really exploded out in a million directions.

Flak: We worked for a while together on trying to put together a book-length version of your strip, or a longer form multi-strip collection — tell me a little bit about your take on that process, and the challenges involved in turning a weekly thing into a book, more or less.

RP: It started out as something that sounded great, but then when you have to sit down and do it ... it's easy for it to become a mountain. That's kind of what happened to me. It's like taking blues, and all of a sudden you want to make a giant Beethoven work where you've got several movements and it's very complex, and I guess I wasn't at the point yet where my characters were mature enough, and what I wanted them to do wasn't mature enough to actually complete a book. And part of that is: sitting down to make a book as your goal kind of cripples you. In the future, as I approach something like that, I'm just gonna try to make a lot of things and see how they fit together. The artwork will determine what it's supposed to be. Because I think of myself as an artist — I can't really sit down to do a big project, right away. But maybe one day, everything I have will kind of turn into a big project.

E-mail James Norton at jim@flakmag.com.