A Comic Artist Questions Himself

Tim: Can you describe Watershed Blues for readers who are unfamiliar with it?
Kitz: Watershed Blues is a mixed-media comic that ran in the Leveller for the last ten issues, from Issue 7.2 (Oct-Nov 2014) to 8.5 (Feb-March 2016).

Tim: What do you mean by mixed media? How did you create the art for the comic?
Kitz: I can’t draw, so I used photos – old historic photos, and ones I took myself. But I wanted the photos to look more cartoony, stylized, and analog. So I would print them out and outline everything in the photo black, using a brush. The idea was to ink the photos the same way a cartoonist would ink their pencil sketches. I was trying to ‘comic’ the photos or to ‘cartoon’ them, if that makes sense.

Tim: What was the comic about?
Kitz: It’s a series of meditations on the ecology of the Kitchissippi (AKA  Ottawa River) watershed. There’s some history, but also a focus on the present-day city of Ottawa itself.

Tim: Serious stuff. In fact, it doesn’t have any of the things we tend to associate with comics. There’s photo-art but no drawings – and no superheroes or jokes, no dialogue, and no real story. Is Watershed Blues really a comic?
Kitz:  I think it’s a comic, since it juxtaposes a series of images with text in an attempt to make an overall statement. But it’s all a big experiment, and it’s up to other people to decide if it works – and if it even counts as a ‘real comic’.

Tim: If it was an experiment, what were you trying to test?
Kitz: Having had a couple of collaborations go nowhere, I was trying to see if I could make comics alone, without working with an artist. I wanted to see if I could create satisfying art for words I’d written, despite having no real artistic talent.
Also, I wanted to make comics that weren’t story-based. Even in non-fiction comics, there’s still usually some sort of story. There’s a lot of biography and autobiography in indie comics for example – so it’s the story of someone’s life.
I didn’t want to do that. In my most pretentious moments, I would say I wanted to make a comic that was less like a story, and more like a song.

The Holy Trinity of Indie Comic Artists and some of their narrative creations. From left to right, R. Crumb, Dan Clowes, and Chris Ware (AKA the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit)

Tim: Can you unpack that a bit?
Kitz: It’s more straightforward than it sounds. Songs are a hybrid art; they combine music and words. Comics combine pictures and words. They’re both hybrid forms.
But while most comics have a story to them, a lot of songs don’t. Song lyrics tend to be more more impressionistic and poetic. Often they’re about what’s going on in someone’s head, what it feels like to be them. It’s much rarer to get a song with distinct plot, characters, and exposition – a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Of course there are exceptions – murder ballads and so on. But that’s not your average song lyric. I wanted to try making comics where the script was more like lyrics or a poem than a story.
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