Lev Yilmaz | Tales of Mere Existence
The Flak Comics Interview
By James Norton

Unique among Flak's strips, Tales of Mere Existence began as an animation, and segued into a more classic, static strip format. Much like Matt Groening's seminal effort Life in Hell, Yilmaz's generally multi-panel stories tell bleakly hilarious tales of heartbreak, insecurity, miscommunication and resentment: in short, stories of true romance.

FLAK MAGAZINE: Let me ask you some very simple, blunt questions to start out. In what city do you live these days and what do you do to pay the bills?

LEV YILMAZ: I live in San Francisco and I'm a freelance animator. I was doing the lip synch animation on a kid's TV program — on the Disney Channel — called The Higglytown Heroes. That was the day job for the last few years. I also do some other various projects like ad spots and whatnot, most of them in other countries.

FLAK: For how long have you been doing the strip Tales of Mere Existence?

LY: Oh, I've been doing this since, to tell you the truth I don't really remember precisely when I started. But oddly enough, the animation actually came before the panel comics. I've been doing the animations and they've been getting around a little bit, but if you do film festivals, regardless of what people might think, nothing will really happen with your career unless your film fits into a very, very precise sort of niche that exists already.

You can do well at the festival but that will be that and so I kind of wanted to find a way to turn it into something that I could do weekly... and so the comics actually came after the movies. And the first bunch of comics that I did, I think for the first maybe year or so are very, very, very crude. But so, I think it's probably kind of an unusual progression, having the comics come after the movies, but there you are.

FLAK: Yeah, I have never heard of that before. As long as we're on the topic of these animations, what's your production routine when you put one of those together? You can get as detailed as you want in terms of the equipment you use or how you storyboard it or what have you, but how do you go about building one of those?

LY: I think the main thing for me really is just getting the script right, so I really take a lot of pains in working that out. I'll do the voice recording and then I'll drink maybe half a bottle of wine. And this is kind of vital, because when I've got a buzz going, I've got a very short attention span so that it's got to hold my attention when I'm a little drunk, and then from there I'll make notes — what I probably don't need and what I should expand on and then from that it really goes very quickly and easily from there. It's just my whole production path is so quick and ridiculous.

I think the funny thing is I don't really care about what medium I'm ever working with. To me, either comics or the movies, it really is just about communicating something, it really isn't about the medium, I don't care what medium I'm using.

FLAK: Yeah I've bounced from print to Web to radio back and forth a number of times over the past few years and I feel basically exactly the same way.

A technical question: how do you do it? I mean you're drawing the strip, and you get to watch the strip being sort of drawn as the narration flows forward, kind of a back-lit setup? Just kinda give me an insight into that.

LY: It's a stolen technique really, from this old movie called The Mystery of Picasso. I saw it many years ago, and then sort of threw it together with... You know, I started it out kind of with like an art and video background, making sort of pretentious art videos, but it really is just kind of thrown together with spit and chicken wire, which is kind of like the way I liked to do things, to put things together in a very very cheap sort of way.

Just to kind of have it look as though anybody can do it, somehow I think the messages, the things I like to talk about, have a tendency to work best in this incredibly cheap sort of presentation.

FLAK: What is the exact cheap setup that you use, or are you being deliberately cagey about revealing your trade secret?

LY: Absolutely, absolutely.

FLAK: Alright, I've got you on the record. Great. Well, let's move to the editorial realm. What was the impetus for doing a strip that revolves around, if not the battle of the sexes, just the lack of ability to communicate with one another. There's a lot of frustrated mating going on (or not going on) in what you do. What made you pick that as your portfolio?

LY: Well actually, to really, really focus on the whole relationship part of it, that's really been something, I've always sort of dabbled in it a bit. But since I've been doing the last three books that I put out, I just figured, well, for the next one, I'll just focus on dating and relationships for a year, just to see how deep I can dig into it. A failure to communicate is always, that's always sort of interesting, whether it be romantically or otherwise. I've experienced frustration myself, but my frustration, I'm sure, is no different than what happens with pretty much anybody else. But I think that I kind of had really a fun time talking about it in this particular way. I felt like I could kind of come at it from a slightly different angle, to use the whole failure to communicate and to look at it in a slightly more introspective way.

FLAK: Are you in a steady relationship at the moment, and if yes, what's her take on the strip, and if no, take it wherever you want, or don't answer my question, however you want to handle it.

LY: Well, you know, the strip has both gotten me in trouble with relationships that I've had and one time it's gotten me into an immense amount of trouble and other times it can almost be like a way of just, it almost can bring up various topics that maybe we needed to talk about. So it's been an odd thing, sometimes it will actually, even if I'm talking cynically about something that might have just happened in the relationship, sometimes it can help repair things, can bring some subjects out into the open. But also it's gotten me in trouble, a couple of years ago in particular.

FLAK: Can you disclose the strip that caused all the trouble?

LY: Um, let's see, It was actually one of the better known of the movies, and that was the one Horny.

It got me into an awful lot of trouble. Actually, I think really the problem was it was a bit more of a cultural thing... it was a person from a very different cultural background and that crow did not caw there.

FLAK: When you got started cartooning or making animations, however you want to come at it, are there any early influences you would cite as helping you develop your style?

LY: When I was a teenager I drew comics, but I didn't know where to start from, so my favorite comic, the one I had been sort of obsessed with is Matt Groening's Life in Hell.

FLAK: I was gonna say Groening, if you hadn't brought that up, there is a visual clarity that's very reminiscent of him.

LY: You know, that was really the foundation. I said OK, I really like this, that's what affected me the most. All of those Life in Hell books, you know, I had them and when I was in art school I read them so religiously even though it never really occured to me to do comics myself. I read those so often so I said OK, this is something I can use as my foundation. I am going to, and I really said, I was going to deliberately more or less copy it, naturally I wasn't going to do the rabbit, but it was going to be my foundation and it's going to evolve from that.

I'm going to start copying this and it will move on, my own thing will come into it pretty quickly, and the first batch that I did were very, very derivative, but then it moved on from it and began to develop its own flavor. But I'd done enough work in other mediums that I just sort of, I didn't worry about doing something too, too original, because I knew, I had been through the process enough times to know that you can start here with the foundation, and your own personality, you'll never be able to copy it exactly, so your own thing is going to develop into it later on down the road, and I decided not to worry about it.

FLAK: Yeah, I used to read Groening as a much younger person, and there's an almost obsessive microanalysis of little patterns of behavior, or particular archetypes of people that Groening really uses quite a lot, and that comes up on your strip quite a lot. You own a tiny corner of emotional space in one of your animations or one of your strips and kinda stake it down, it's a little like Curb your Enthusiasm it feels like sometimes.

LY: I'm weirdly, completely unfamiliar with CYE, I've never seen it, but I think that's kind of the idea, to work with archetypes. I'm an absolute people watcher I'm always listening in on people. You hear these little patterns of speech and it's not only that you've heard them or seen some behavior in other people, it's not just that, it's that I like to connect those things to stuff that I would do when I'm in a particularly good mood or bad mood or naive mood or anythihng like that, to just sort of maybe try to get under the skin a little bit and figure out what they're probably thinking and what they might be feeling.

I can hear myself in other people talking all the time and so that winds up being a huge source of ideas, is ... just sort of identifying, especially there's things that people do that remind me not of the way I am now, but the way that I used to be. You feel like you can follow somebody's thought process and whether or not you're accurate with it, you can come up with an idea.

FLAK: You should definitely give CYE a shot, I think you'd enjoy it. He's also very astuate about homing in on certain patterns of speech, and the way people misinterpret tiny things that then turn into titanic problems. He'll pick up tiny habits and little mistakes and blow them out to ridiculous proportions. I think there are elements of what you do in what he does. So tell me a little bit about the three books you've got out, and how you put a book together.

LY: Well, I'm still very much operating under the DIY sort of method, but it really is just, when I've got enough material for a book, out it will go, and they've been getting progressively bigger. The one that I put out about a year ago, 7 habits of Highly Negative People I think was the biggest. The one that should be coming out in the next couple of months is bigger still. There really isn't that much too it — I take a lot of pains with the running order. I get very into things, for instance, the way that music albums are put together, the way this song will flow into that one, whatever, so I take a lot of pains with that, but it's an unusually good looking sort of thing that's done on a photocopier, and each one comes with a DVD, and that's really that.

This is the one that's all about love and relationships. I'm not sure whether I'm going to be putting this one up or not, I haven't made up my mind yet, but I just finished a movie that's really unusual for the series, first of all its the longest of the Tales movies that I've ever made — it's five-and-a-half minutes long — and also it's co-written and co-performed, so it's my voice and somebody else's. It's me and somebody that I was briefly involved with and we're just kind of going over various things that went wrong. It's called "How We Managed to Not Really Date Each Other" and the really funny thing to me is when you're writing by yourself, you can edit yourself out at your worst and at your dumbest, but the funny thing about this piece is there are all sorts of things that I couldn't really get away with. So, it's a little more revealing than it would have been if I'd done it myself.

FLAK: I went to your YouTube page and it looks like you've got many thousands of viewers — do you feel that you have kind of a vital fan base that actually give you feedback and follow what you do, or are they mostly silently lurking, more of a presence on paper than in the way you put your work together?

LY: Well, the funny thing especially with the feedback... I did a piece maybe about a month or two ago that was different, and I used a different voice in it, and admittedly it was not one of my best ones. It was this one where I talked in this sort of Dr. Strangelove kind of German accent and a bunch of people kinda said: "Well, my advice to you is you shouldn't do this because I like the way that it is better before." And although I guess I understand, I appreciate where they're coming from, the thing is that even if, you know, people kinda expect the same thing over and over again, everything is going to get very pale if you do the same thing over and over again.

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