In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve known (and been a fan of) Matt MacFarland for about 8 years, ever since he did a webcomic for a site I helped run around the turn of the century - a webcomic which I also colored and lettered. So it’s been that long that I’ve wondered why more people weren’t as big of fan of him as I was, it couldn’t be simply because nobody knew who he was, right? It wasn’t just that I had the perfect kind of off-center sense of humor to appreciate his work, and most people just didn’t skew that way was it? It couldn’t be that in all this time one of my favorite cartoonists in the whole world didn’t even have a book deal either, could it?

Well yes, actually, it could be all of that. Although (hopefully) much of that is about to change.

Matt MacFarland is an artist of many disciplines, who splits his time between his home life, his job teaching, and creating works for his various shows and installations in and around the Los Angeles area, and when he’s not busy doing all that he draws comics. Which brings this intro full-circle.

Murdershow: So I guess the first time I ever became aware of your work was around 99-2000 or so, I saw your single strip comics online somewhere, and they were so wacky and offbeat and just so genuinely funny, and didn’t rely on that setup to punchline formula of pretty much every other multi-paneled strip out there, and I can’t even remember where or how I found them now, but that was I guess the stuff that would eventually turn into Bargain Bin, right?

Matt MacFarland: Yeah, I’d been cartooning all my life, but after graduating from UC Santa Cruz I put a more concentrated effort into trying to get stuff published, drawing a single-panel cartoon or two every day, making copies and sending them off to syndicates and various publications. I think I probably sent some stuff to you at the website you worked at, I forgot what it was called when I first submitted stuff but you asked for a name for my cartoons, so I came up with Bargain Bin. It seemed fitting, because I never really had an overarching theme or cohesive narrative to my comics. They varied wildly from cartoon to cartoon.

When I look back at the stuff they seem very conventional to me, although my sense of humor is still in there, but I can’t say I’m that proud of them. My borrowing of the Far Side/Bizarro sensibilities and format seems blatantly obvious to me.

But I always graviated toward dark humor, humor revolving around death, dismemberment, horribly awkward or absurd scenarios. I’ve never really been a funny person in social situations, being a natural introvert (as many cartoonists are). When I did try to make a joke, especially when I was younger, it came out wrong and the crickets were chirping and it was humiliating. Cartoons provided a place for my closet comedian to emerge, and people actually laughed!

MS: And have you ever considered going into stand-up then, or is your art enough of an outlet for that?

MM: I think I would be an awful comedian, but then that might be kind of interesting. I have a soft spot in my heart for awful comedians, or really sincere comedians who have faded away. A few months ago I saw a “stand-up class” offered in Pasadena and was considering taking it and documenting the process, and I still might. But like I said before, I’m not an extrovert - I don’t necessarily crave attention and I’m not a very funny person unless I’m around people I know well, like my close friends and family. Anyway, my comics and drawings are more funny than I as a comedian could ever be. They definitely provide that outlet that my closet comedian craves. I saw that one of my cartoon heroes, Dan Piraro (Bizarro) recently started touring as a stand-up comedian and I thought that was pretty great.

MS: As far as any Farside similarities that were there, inevitably at some point all one panel humor comics get compared to that right? But you did a comic once with Young MC, and another with Martin Short’s robot butler, and even the old pervert selling tickles to children, after all these years those in particular are stuck in my head and really seem to hold up aside from any other strip comparisons.

MM: Yeah, I like those okay. D-list celebrities are a ready-made joke so I always felt guilty incorporating them into my cartoons, but I couldn’t resist. I mean, honestly, it’s not Young MC’s or Kirk Cameron’s fault that they have fallen out of favor. Okay, maybe it is Kirk Cameron’s fault, but it’s just the nature of the fame/celebrity machine that builds these people up and then grinds them down. But I mean I still laugh at any mention of Andrew Dice Clay or Lance Bass. Their irrelevance is comical. Yet they are tragic figures in some way too, and a lot of my current artwork is about that too, the interdependence of comedy and tragedy. I think that’s what most of my cartoons and current artwork is about. Tragedy giving way to comedy and vice versa. And failure, failure is always funny. I fail often, whether I’m being rejected from an art gallery or smashing my head into a doorway, so being able to make fun of yourself is crucial too if you are willing to mock other people.

MS: Do you have any favorites that stick out, or do they all just seem like a bad hangover now?

MM: I think my favorite cartoon from that time would have to be the one where the guy is driving a firetruck while wearing an astronaut’s helmet and an eye patch while wearing a hook. The caption says, “Timmy surpassed even his own childhood expectations when he became a fireman-pirate-astronaut”. It seemed to be my first fully realized joke. I even sold it to Dan Piraro of Bizarro fame because he liked it so much. He basically said all my other stuff was shit, but he liked that one comic, so I gave the idea to him for the original artwork. So that was cool.

MS: So Bargain Bin pretty much ran it’s course, a year maybe, and then you started working on, which you would show to me later, some multi-paneled autobiographical comics. Where was the shift for that from, and how long did that last?

MM: I started to feel very constrained by the 1-panel format, so I thought I’d draw some autobiographical cartoons. I was reading a lot of Clowes stuff (Ghost World, David Boring, etc) and Joe Matt (peepshow) and Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve), and all their work was either overt or veiled autobiographical stories so I wanted to get in on the action! Again, my influences are painfully obvious in the resulting cartoons. I am mildly proud of those however because they more succintly address my ideas about comedy and tragedy and utter, utter failure, which is what my first couple relationships with girls were. Total disasters. And I liked how the stories could be simultaneously heartwrenching and comical. For instance, with my first girlfriend I didn’t kiss her for a whole year because I was petrified to. IT seriously was one of the most nerve-wracking years of my life building up to that first kiss, yet looking back the situation was totally ridiculous and trivial. And the first kiss itself was a catastrophe…tongues flailing everywhere. So I guess I tried my best to look back at my life, locate the most embarassing moments and exploit them for comic effect.

MS: There’s that theme of failure again. It’s all sort of a beautiful train wreck then, is that where your fascination lies?

MM: Yeah, pretty much that’s where my fascination lies. I mean, there’s nothing funny about people succeeding, about an athlete who overcomes all odds and wins a sports championship or a businessman who gets promoted and is able to afford a five-bedroom house in a new sub-division. Failure is just more interesting. And when I think of superheroes, none of those guys or girls have much of a sense of humor either. Well, most of them don’t, correct me if I’m wrong. Maybe Batman? Aquaman? But that’s just because he is a joke, back to the d-list celebrity thing, the d-list superhero.

MS: Well he can talk to fish, but it’s kind of become more of an asking power than a mind control power nowadays right? When we were kids, Aquaman could force a whale by the sheer power of his mind to do his bidding, now he has to say “please” and hope the mighty fish is in a good mood.

Anyways, on the theme of succeeding, it seemed like around 2002 or so that you stopped doing comics for awhile - or at least as much - is that right?

MM: Well, actually I got into Graduate school for Fine art and moved to Los Angeles to attend Otis College of Art and Design. I never really stopped drawing cartoons, I just started devoting some of my time to other artistic endeavors….painting, sculpture, video, etc. But actually during my time there I started drawing Art School Exploits, a comic strip devoted to my experiences observing the art critiques at Otis. Some of the conversations and artwork produced were so absurd that I felt I had to document them somehow (again some credit is due to one of my influences, Daniel Clowes and his Art School Confidential series). But I actually was very happy with the instruction at Otis, I think in many ways I started to grasp what I wanted to do artistically and my cartoons benefitted from my time at Otis as well. I started to find my voice and tried to separate myself a little more from my artistic influences like Joe Piscopo and Cloris Leachman. See? Such an easy ready-made joke…

MS: And what did you come away from school with?

MM: I attended from 2001-2003 and received an MFA. Unfortunately, it’s really difficult to show in galleries or teach without a Masters and those were two things I wanted to do.

MS: So how has teaching been - in general but also for your art?

MM: I’m working at this non-profit Arts Organization called the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California. I get to develop my own lessons and projects and the great thing is I get to work with kids ranging from 3-18, so there’s never a dull moment.

I love working with the really young kids, though they require a tremendous amount of energy, but as Bill Cosby knows they really do say the darndest things. For example, one kid came up to me, he was probably four years old and said, with a look of wide-eyed astonishment, “Did you know that the food we eat becomes poop?”. Priceless. Also, this five year old bully named Bruno (I’m not making that up. It might as well have been Bluto) came up to me after pummeling some kid and said “Jesus is a spirit and he’s all around us.” So yeah, it’s worth it just for little nuggets of wisdom like those.

MS: Does your sense of humor tend to play well off the kids, or do they sort of not know what to make of you?

MM: At the Armory they encourage us to develop lessons and projects that relate to our practice, so a lot of the stuff I come up with has to do with mythical creatures, cartooning and caricature. So I’m very passionate when teaching those subjects because they’re subjects I’m invested in already. And like I said before, I’m not very funny in person, but sometimes I drop a little one-liner in there or deliberately say something unexpected just to keep their attention. It’s very rewarding to see a student do a double-take, or look at me like “What??”. I know I’ve earned their respect then.

MS: Getting back to art, you said you began exploring painting and sculpture while at Otis, what did you find while doing that, and how did it differ from the sorts of things you could explore with your comics?

MM: What I found while experimenting with different materials and approaches at Otis was that an idea had to be funny for me to be motivated to execute the painting, sculpture or video. In some ways my other artwork was just an extension of my comics, there was usually a punchline in there, though they were sometimes very oblique. Also, the comedy/tragedy theme was pretty apparent in all my work. Of course, there are things that you can achieve in sculpture that you can’t with comics and vice versa, but I tried to impose my sense of humor on everything I did, and hopefully that would be what would engage viewers. As an example, one of my early sculptures while at Otis was a blob of sculpey with a large eyeball glued on. I called it Chicklebits. I wanted to create a sculpture that was as stupid as possible, containing the least amount of information. It was so stupid it was funny and in some ways it was a reaction to all the people in the program that were trying so hard to make art that “looked” like legitimate fine art. The sculpture didn’t really look like art, it just looked like a blob with an eye and I liked that.

MS: Were you hated by your peers for this kind of stuff, or did they come to accept your approach and humor, or… ?

MM: My peers were pretty supportive of what I was doing, many of the faculty not so much. Some of them went so far as to even ask “What is this crap?” and I was on academic probation for a while because they couldn’t really figure out what I was up to. To be honest I didn’t really know what I was up to, I was just playing with ideas…trying to figure out my place in the program and re-evaluate what i was interested in artistically. That’s where the Art School Exploits came out of, the derision of classmates stemming from a deep sense of insecurity, not thinking I belonged there. I had a little bit of a breakdown while there. But I finally came to the realization that I needed to exhibit all the stuff that I was thinking about and working on that had been kept under wraps while at school, including my cartoons. A series of works (that is ongoing) called The Lost Artworks came out of that. Basically I just put unresolved and seemingly unrelated artwork like the aforementioned sculpture, my cartoons, found objects, wall paintings, text, dead ferrets, half-eaten sandwiches, etc on display and it was up to the viewer to make sense of it. The “lost” referring to the meaning being elusive, and to the fact that they had been incognito for a while. It didn’t really matter to me if people liked it or not, I felt like I was finally doing some work I believed in. Maybe my description of this piece sounds pretentious, but I just didn’t feel satisfied churning out painting after painting with virtually the same content. This felt more authentic to me.

MS: And how has it gone in the wilds of Los Angeles since you’ve left school?

MM: Needless to say, Los Angeles’ citizens’ collective minds were blown! No, it’s been slow but steady going since I’ve left school. I’ve been showing regularly, just not at any major venues and no big write-ups. But the Lost Artworks has changed a lot since school, it’s more cohesive and coherent. I try to produce works that revolve around a big theme or two. For instance, for my last show all the pieces (drawings, video, sculpture) were directly or indirectly related to the four presidents on Mt. Rushmore and/or the Marx Brothers. I made a Rushmore anti-monument out of foam that can be turned upside down to reveal a different presidents’ face. I even had some Marx Brothers impersonators show up at the opening and terrorize the guests. But we can get back to the cartooning if you wish. It’s all interconnected.

MS: So let’s get a little technical about your art then. Describe your processes for me, with comics or a painting - how you work from start to finish, tools, studio space, all that.

MM: It’s funny that you want me to get technical, because I’m like the least technical artist out there. I mean my aesthetics are very basic, but I do like art that is very simple, handcrafted and direct. But lately I’ve been using acrylic ink for a lot of my drawings and cartoons. I work at a drawing table in my studio which is the extra bedroom of my house. That is truly where the magic (interpretive dance) happens.

My cartoon format changed after grad school however. I started working in a six-panel layout so a more distinct narrative could develop. Plus I could work two or three jokes into a cartoon instead of just one with the single-panels. I also liked how they could lead a reader in one direction, then pull the rug out from under them at the end, there was more of an opportunity to build-up expectations. Ultimately that’s what comedy is all about, the unexpected.

MS: A lot of your comics have captions that may not seemingly have anything to do with the image itself, do you work from an idea forward or sometimes decide the “punchline” later after you’ve finished the piece?

MM: In regards to the “drawings” which are very similar to the cartoons but which I like to keep separate, yes I tried to bring together seemingly unrelated text and image to see how they would co-exist. Typically they would be procured or invented at different times and then I tried to see which text/image would produce the most interesting combinations, take me in directions I hadn’t anticipated. Sometimes I appropriate the image and text, sometimes I invent the image and text, I don’t have any set rules or order. And you’re right to call them “punchlines” because that’s what I was thinking about. I was trying to undermine the comedic “punch” that a punchline promises, they’re more of a “pulled punchline” I guess. The text doesn’t necessarily reiterate what the image presents.

MS: So I’d get lashed by my co-host at Murdershow here if I didn’t ask this at some point - “where is your book”?

MM: I actually just finished compiling a collection of cartoons from 2000-2008. I’m waiting to see the proof and then I’ll probably send it out to publishers (on your suggestion) and see if they’ll bite. If not, I’ll sell it on my website. It doesn’t contain any of the early single-panel work but it has a lot of my six-panel and autobiographical stuff. It is called Yizzay!! Selected Cartoons 2000-2008. And I’d like to also plug my latest line of veal chops. They’re called MacChops and you can order them at any Kenny Rogers Roasters!

MS: So why haven’t we seen a book from you before now?

MM: Honestly, I didn’t really have enough quality cartoons to publish before now. Putting a book together had been in the back of my mind for some time, but I wanted to make sure that there wouldn’t be any filler. Also I tend to spread myself a little thin sometimes. Lately I’ve had a tendency to construct giant sculptures for the gallery shows I’m in and that takes a ridiculous amount of time and effort. I don’t know why I do that to myself, but that’s how my artwork outside of cartooning has progressed. But thanks to some gentle prodding from friends I realized it was time to take the book idea off the back burner and get my “rear in gear” as my dad likes to say.

MS: And if this book works out, any plans or ideas on what you might want to try and tackle next?

MM: I’ll just continue making more comics I guess. I still find working in the six panel format fertile ground, so I’ll do that until it’s not interesting to me anymore. So yes, hopefully another book will be on the way in a few years.

MS: Anything else you want to plug Matt?

MM: The only other thing I’d like to plug would be my website, but you’ve plugged that enough already. Oh, and I have some art shows coming up in July, and two in October in Los Angeles. At one of those shows I will be premiering my book of cartoons, so watch out world!