An Interview with Molly Crabapple: Part Two (In which John Levaitt joins the party!)

Posted on March 9th, 2011 - 09:05 AM by

Last week the blog at comiXology brought you an inside look at Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-art school and the first part of our interview with The Puppet Makers and Scarlett Takes Manhattan co-creator Molly Crabapple. Today we’re keeping the ball rolling with part two of our exclusive interview with Molly Crabapple as this time she is joined by her Dr. Sketchy cohort and comic book partner in crime John Levaitt the current creative director of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art school.  For part one of the interview scroll further down this page; for part two simply keep reading!

comiXology: Thanks for joining us John, our last question was on Puppet Makers? Care to share any insight on how the project came about?

John: Sci-fi and French History are both big hobbyhorses of Molly and I, and we felt the Sun King’s Court felt like something out of science fiction anyway. Plus, who wouldn’t want an excuse to draw all those baroque gold fripperies.

comiXology: Cool, now what have been some of your influences both in comics and out, what would you recommend folks read these days?

Molly: Right now I’m obsessed with Joan Sfar, the French comics creator who did The Rabbi’s Cat, The Little Vampire, and Klezmar, and who directed the new Gainsbourg movie.  His stuff is so tender and human and anti-authoritarian and whimsical that you find your face contorting into emotions you thought you had long since buried.  In comics, I also love Kevin O’Neill, Marjene Sartrapi, The Sandman, the usual suspects.

Outside: Toulouse Lautrec, Aubrey Beardsley, scathing political cartoons from the time when political machines ran New York, and popular illustration, like the stuff on matchbooks and the back of cubes of pool chalk. What should you read?  Joan Sfar.  Yes, read Joan Sfar, so I can gush to more people about him.

John: I’m currently in lust with Jason Lutes’ Berlin books.

comiXoloy: If you guys could travel back in time to any particular era what would it be and why?

Molly: I’m not too big on time travel.  God bless birth control, and the internet. It’s much more interesting to cull the coolest aspects of
an era while leaving the suppurating syphilis sores behind.

John: I think as long as you’re at the top of the social heap, any time is fine. Unless you’re in one of those places where the top people get sacrificed to keep the sun shining. Then not so much.

comiXology: Now you’ve gotten to step into the world superhero’s in the past in addition to some of your more recent independent work. If you could have a superpower yourself what would it be? And for that matter are their any mainstream characters out there right now you’d like to work on?

John: Telekinesis seems like the most practical, but I don’t need another excuse to never get off the couch. I’ve always wanted to write Dazzler, actually. But as a Edena Monsoon-esque washout. Faded Disco Queen and all that

Molly: I wouldn’t sleep.  Just work.  Can coffee be a superpower?

comiXology: With books like The Puppet Makers and Scarlett Takes Manhattan available for digital download right now, do you see the digital marketplace as a viable way to get your work out to people?

Molly: I do!  comiXology is an amazing platform, and I think your interface for reading comics is extremely elegant.  However, I got to say I’m pretty old school and don’t have an ipad or a kindle.  I like to have books I can drop.

John: Completely. I think the digital marketplace is going to blow up comics in a huge way. And just for vanity’s sake, I love the way my stuff looks on an iPad.

comiXology: Alright last question. What can readers expect from you in the future got anything in the works that you could tease us with?

John: We’re currently working on another graphic novel that one of my friends described as “Like the Music Man, but evil.”

Molly: Me and John recently signed up to do a new graphic novel with First Second Books, titled Straw House. It’s the tale of an immortal carnival that brings truth, and destruction, on a small rust belt town in the 1950′s.  We hope we to do a good job.

comiXology: We have no doubt it will be great, thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions guys!

Molly and John’s books can be read both in print and exclusively through comiXology. Check out their awesome comics along with over 6,900 others and don’t forget to check  back often for all the latest updates on new comics coming out, new sales going on and brand new interviews with folks creating comics on the cutting edge!


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An Interview With Molly Crabapple: Part One

Posted on March 3rd, 2011 - 10:21 AM by

Whether creating killer comics like Scarlett Takes Manhattan, modeling for fellow artist’s or meticulous researching the palace of Versailles for DC’s The Puppet Makers Molly Crabapple has a style that is all her own. One of the masterminds behind the coveted Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School her work has hung in art galleries across the world while also appearing in everything form The Wall Journal to Mainstream Marvel and DC comics. Dubbed “A Downtown Phenomenon” by the New York Times Ms.Crabapple was nice enough to answer a few questions about her travels, her art and her life general in a two part interview series exclusively with comiXology. Check out part one below:

comiXology: First off, What is the origin of Dr. Sketchy’s and in what ways has it grown over the years?

Molly Crabapple: During college, I studied art and worked as an artist’s model.  The classes, while educational, didn’t live up to the absinthe and Kiki de Montparnasse fantasy I had.  I started Dr. Sketchy’s to create an art class that jived with my fantasies. Since we started it in a dive bar in Brooklyn five years ago, we’ve exploded to over a hundred cities across the US, Europe, Asia and Australia.  We’ve done flash mobs in Times Square, thrown events in the Museum of Modern Art, and, today, Roger Ebert said we were ”inspired” on facebook.  Roger friggin Ebert!

comiXology: Any memorable sessions that stick out over the five year’s you’ve been running it?

Molly: We’ve had so many sessions that, after them, we’ve screamed “Best session ever!”  A few of my favorites are our Hunter S Thompson tribute, with bats hanging from the ceiling, our five year anniversary party, where we had all the Apocalypse’s (the rapture and nuclear bombs and Kali Ma and tank girl and zombies) happening at once in our favorite speakeasy, our Sandman Sketchy’s where Death, Delirium and Desire were so friggin’ embodying their characters I have to say though, that our last Dr. Sketchy’s, which was a tribute to Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan, will live on in glory because of the prop making genius of our creative coordinator Melissa Dowell, who stayed up late into the night constructing bowel disruptors and two headed cats, our makeup artist Jess Versus, who recreated all of Spider’s tattoos, and because of our models, , Jiz Lee and Ryan Keely, who sneered, smoked, shot and flipped the bird through three epic hours of art rockstarness.  Guys, I salute you.

comiXology: As the one of the head’s of Dr. Sketchy’s anti-art school you’ve gotten to travel all over the world, folks can read about your past adventures on the travel blog on mollycrabapple.com, but are there any trips your looking forward to in the near future?

Molly: The next three months are proper insanity- I’m speaking at SXSW in Austin, and then Stumptown in Portland is bringing me out as a guest. But I’m really looking forward to tagging along with Fred to Istanbul in May, where he’s a guest at the Turkish Humor Festival, and I will lounge around eating loukham and going to hammams. I haven’t been to Turkey in almost 10 years, and it was one of my favorite countries to visit in the world.

comiXology: On the subject of Puppet Makers how did the project come about?

Molly: Me and John were totally into steampunk before it was cool!  In college, we really liked the idea of using anachronistic technology to explore how fucked up a society could be. We were reading alot about Versailles, and I started thinking that, were their robots in the court of Louis XIV, aristocrats would totally use them to fulfill inane court rituals. The  historical moment that inspired it all was when a royal mistress, of middle class origin, fainted after performing her twenty five deep curtsy for the queen mother. Court protocol was too much for human bodies. Also, ruffles.  I like to draw ruffles.

comiXology: Now, Puppet Makers was one of the first comics to come about after some Major changes on DC’s Zuda comics Imprint. Any chance you could shed some light on that process?

Molly: Me and John are way more in each other’s business than the typical artist/writer team is.  We create the plot together, I make suggestions on John’s scripts, John thumbnails our comics, and draw hundreds and hundreds of lilies.  Then I gild them.  The Puppet Makers also necessitated an insane amount of historical research. John even made the trip to Versailles.

Next up we talk time travel, influences, and superpowers as Molly continues to shed light on her work both in and out of comics. In the meantime check out the latest chapter of Molly and John’s action packed romp through 17th century france in The Puppet Makers available for download on the DC comics app and Web Store.

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