Part Three of Five

BACK TO PART TWO | FORWARD TO PART FOUR
COLEMAN: Before Woobait, I did a comic for Denis Kitchen and ended up in Dope Comics, even though it was not related to dope.

GATES: [laughs] It just looked like somebody who did dope made it, right?

COLEMAN: Yeah, so Denis Kitchen put on it: "Joe Coleman's piece on a guy on a bum trip." [laughs] And I was like, "What?!" There was no intention of drugs in the thing at all.
GATES: What was that one called?

COLEMAN: It was called, "Cry, Cry, Cretin", done in '78.

GATES: Was that more like the panel serial piece?

COLEMAN: It was a day in the life of this schizophrenic person, and that's probably why Denis Kitchen saw it as drugs, because the guy is constantly hallucinating. But it's not because he's doing any drugs; he doesn't do any drugs. But with schizophrenia, it resembles drugs because thoughts are invading the mind that you don't have any control over. Often really disturbing things. When people think of schizophrenia, they often think "split personality," but that's not what schizophrenia is. I was always fascinated by that. It seems very scary to me. I've had experiences like that. When I did drugs, often that would happen. I think drugs induce a schizophrenic-like state. When I did marijuana, eventually I became paranoid. I would get afraid of what I would do or what other people would do, and that things could just happen. So I would get too paranoid and I couldn't do it, it would just make me nuts. So I was geared more toward heroin, which is what I ended up becoming addicted to, because heroin would do the opposite: it had calm effects on me. It would calm the scary impulses and weird ideas that are frightening. It would make it so that everything was okay. It didn't matter. A streetcar would run over your legs and you'd just say, "Wow, my legs have been run over!" and it would be any big deal. That kind of peace of mind felt really good -- but it felt too good because I wasn't used to that much peace of mind.

GATES: When you were doing that, were you doing any comics?

COLEMAN: Yeah, but it ended up taking too much time away from my work. My life got pushed to the side -- comics, art, everything. The drug becomes bigger and the world becomes smaller.

GATES: Simplifies things. One focus for your life.

COLEMAN: Yeah. So when I got off of methadone -- first I had to go on meth, and that was actually stupid because that was tougher to kick than heroin. But eventually I got off. The first comic that I did was what I think is my weakest comic, which is the one on Jean Paul Moels. Even though I kind of liked the story that I wrote for it, I don't like the artwork. I'd lost too much control at that point, I'd gotten too rusty, I'd waited too long.

GATES: The story wasn't based on --

COLEMAN: No, it was me trying to interpret what was going on in his mind. The girl in the story did write about him, but I'm doing it from his perspective, not from hers. That was about '87.

GATES: That was about the final days of the serial killer.
COLEMAN: Yeah. It was part of a series, a contemporary story. Then I did more period pieces: Panzram and Jack Black, Boxcar Bertha.

GATES: What appeals to you in doing comics, when you decide to do one? You do them less and less frequently, but what is the appeal in doing one, as compared with painting?

COLEMAN: There is something nostalgic -- that term is used so much today that it takes away from its true meaning. When I say "nostalgic," I'm talking about what it really means: it's homesickness, and this desire to return to home, to return to sources, origins. There is something good about returning to when I first saw comic books and was fascinated by them. Doing comics is kind of the same reason I do monster models -- it brings me back to this perception of the world.

GATES: You mean the way you saw the world as a child? The more immediate sensational emotions?

COLEMAN: Yeah. It's trying to access those feelings.
GATES: So the genre of comics is something that reminds you of that state of mind you were in when you were reading them as a child?

COLEMAN: Yep. Just like putting together a monster model does that.

GATES: Comics also say, as opposed to the painting, tell a story in a much more linear fashion.

COLEMAN: Yeah. I'm giving you a real personal answer, but to get into a more technical reason, even though my paintings are narrative, the narrative exists all at once, whereas in comics, especially the way I'm doing it with one image at a time and you turn the page... You can do different things with rhythm, with revealing stuff, that's first hidden then you turn the page and it reveals something. I do that in a different way in painting -- where you discover things in the painting that you haven't seen before.
GATES: Actually The Man of Sorrows is a way of turning a painting into a comic book, in a strange way. It wasn't intentionally like that, but it exploding the painting into its little pieces in a narrative order, and telling each of those stories, then you can elaborate in the frameworks. It became almost this Wolverine Woobait plus your painting in a comic book.
COLEMAN: Yeah. If it can be termed "comic book," and I guess it can, then it's my favorite comic book. It seemed like an ideal way for me to go because it allows both at the same time -- it allows what I like about painting, and the things about comics that I like to play off each other and converse with each other, and then tell me even more information. I got a certain amount out of painting The Man of Sorrows, but when I did The Illuminated Manuscript of the painting, then it told me even more. The more I thought about it, the painting spoke to me, and the manuscript then spoke, then they started speaking to each other ...

GATES: And then these other dimensions started revealing themselves, like the connection between Salome cradling the head of John the Baptist and Dian holding Junior in the bottle --

COLEMAN: And the baby Jesus suckling Mary. It provides an even further process.
GATES: And it permits in a way, the viewer to see your paintings in another way: Exploded, perhaps, and taken apart, and dug underneath, and each of the little sections of the painting get more and more insight into each of the decisions you've made to represent them. There is a lot of mystery in your work. You have to look at a lot of Joe Coleman paintings to get a handle on what's happening, what is in these details and what the references are.

COLEMAN: Yeah. My surfaces are rich with images. But there are images underneath the images that people don't see unless you look at my work a lot, and unless you start using your mind, your feelings. There are worlds inside there that are hiding underneath the surface.

GATES: That's why it would be so great to do a CD-ROM interactive thing, because you could keep opening up each thing and passing through each one into the next layer and next layer. There is a certain archeological quality to a lot of these things, and the end result, the glowing tube, just doesn't seem to be much of a Joe Coleman thing.
COLEMAN: Yeah. I'd like to do more books, too, in the style of Man of Sorrows.

GATES: [laughs]Well, now that we've figured out how to do it, I'm sure the next one will be a lot easier. Do you have ideas for other comics you'd like to do? Weren't you interested in doing one on Quantrill?

COLEMAN: I've thought about it. He'd certainly be a good subject.

GATES: And it would relate to the other historical figures. There is a consistency in the people you've picked to do this work about. There is a certain distance in the past -- you seem to be separating from them.

COLEMAN: The period relates to ... I see the parallel as being really fascinating. This period I've chosen, around the turn of the century, seems to resemble this period in history right now. The feelings of the characters are very much like what's going on now -- people think of that period, after the Victorian era, as being simple --

GATES: More orderly and less crime ...

COLEMAN: Serene ... But that's not what it was like.
GATES: No, it's totally insane! I've been reading this book about it, and they were fascinated by sensationalism -- there was no Geraldo and Oprah back then. There was a certain popular obsession with these penny novel dreadfuls and these engravings, because the illustrations for all of these horrible crimes, like Jack the Ripper, were these elaborate illustrations that were engravings that are quite a bit like the panels in your comics. There is this feeling of the world falling apart at the seams, and the decay. And they were thinking back to the previous era when they thought it was simpler and cleaner! And we're coming up on a millennium right now, so who knows what's going to happen! They talk about this "thing" that happens at the end of every century, a certain kind of millennial feeling, of decay of order, a feeling of decay.
COLEMAN: And this is more than just the end of a century.

GATES: Yeah, and you reflect it perfectly.
COLEMAN: It feels like something is coming loose.Just before Jesus was executed in Matthew, I think chapter 20, verse 28, Jesus says, "Do no weep for me, but weep for yourselves and weep for your children. For behold there will come a day when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren. Blessed are the wombs that did not give birth. Blessed are the tits that did not give suck.' And in that day they will say to the mountains, 'Fall on us,' and to the hills, 'Cover us.'" And that's these days. That's now. Because now there are too many people. Now mankind is like a disease that's destroying the planet, the host. There are too many. So now, blessed are those who do not produce children. Blessed are the barren. Nature does not want more of this species. There are too many of us. Nature wants to cut back the species. It's time to do that. Nature has many fun ways of doing that. Aside from age, you've got all kinds of things happening. From the use of antibiotics, that we thought we were really starting to get somewhere with this stuff --

GATES: But now we're just creating more and more evil strains.

COLEMAN: That's right. It's ready to just burst at the seams. There are these weird things that almost make it out into the general population. There are weird viruses that are just waiting. We know about AIDS, but there can be much worse ones that are just starting to cook now, getting ready to mutate.

GATES: Bubble up to the surface. Ever more interesting ways to destroy the human body.

COLEMAN: Yeah, and it's necessary. It's what's needed by nature. Warfare is necessary. You look around and there's hate everywhere. There is more hate now. More blacks hate whites, more whites hate blacks. More rich hate the poor, more poor hate the rich. More women hate men and more men hate women. Everybody hates each other. Everyone's seething. And that's because that's what Nature wants. Nature wants you hate each other.

GATES: Like when they put too many rats in a big box together, and they start killing each other.

COLEMAN: That's right. They start eating each other.

GATES: So, are these the end times?

COLEMAN: Yeah. And that's the reason there's so much sexual deviation. Because sexual deviation goes against procreative sex.

GATES: They are the blessed because they're not going to have any babies!

COLEMAN: That's right. Nature wants you to be a sexual deviant because you won't produce any more of the species. And Nature wants you to kill off what's here. Nature's going to want more crime, more murder, more drug addiction. Anything that's going to help. You see it all around. Everything's coming apart at the seams.
GATES: How about the Book of Daniel and Revelations? You're having the visions he had.

COLEMAN: It's interesting that that comes at the end of the Bible. It resembles a lot of the earlier writers, but it comes at the end.

GATES: The Pope's Commission decided to leave that one in, huh? Instead of keeping it out?

COLEMAN: Yeah -- leave it on a nice, dramatic note. And it influenced people like Nostradamus.

COLEMAN: You know what the name of the last Antichrist is? There are three of them. The first one was Napoleon. The second was Hitler. Do you remember who the last one is?

GATES: No. In Nostradamus?

COLEMAN: Mombooze-o. (Coleman's alter ego)

GATES: You mean I'm sitting in a room with the Antichrist?
COLEMAN: No, I don't really know that I am the Antichrist, I don't really think so. I just think it's an interesting anecdote for me. The name was handed to me by some drunken fan.

GATES: At one of your performances, right?

COLEMAN: Yeah. He used to call me Mad Dog. And since he was so drunk, it came out in a slur. I heard the slur as "Mombooze-o" That was my ear hearing what this slur was.

GATES: At that time did you know the last Antichrist was called Mombooze-o?

COLEMAN: No. I found that out recently.

GATES: You later realized that --

COLEMAN: That my interpretation of it was Mom -- my mom -- and Booze-o, is my father. So you put the two together, and it's Mombooze-o. Nostradamus' names are always a little bit different, like Hitter was interpreted as Hitler.

GATES: Like he was hearing it through centuries of clogged airwaves. So your most recent painting is the Mombooze-o painting, of an Antichrist figure. It connects in with this whole series of Christ characters you've been doing.
COLEMAN: Yeah. Christ and the Antichrist are both the same person. I am Jesus Christ. And I am Mombooze-o, I am the Antichrist. I am the Savior and I'm the Devil. And so are you. The only place that evil exists -- you have all these people freaking out, pointing the finger: "It's pornography! It's Charles Manson! That's what's evil! It's the white man!" All those fingers are pointing outward.

GATES: It's the white male oppressor!

COLEMAN: Yeah, right. The real evil only exists in one place. It exists here. [pointing to himself] When the finger points outward, it's the most dangerous because it fails to see the source. Charles Manson is just a pathetic character. But the one who points to him and tells you, "You've got to watch out for that devil!", that's the one you have to watch out for. Not the one he's pointing to, but the one who's doing the pointing.
GATES: And Manson is the one who said, "Look at me."

COLEMAN: Yeah. The line he said, which is really beautiful, is, "Look down on me and you will see a fool. Look up at me and you will see the Lord. But look straight at me, and you will see yourself." The only place that real evil exists in the world is in yourself. You have to find it there first. That's the only place you'll find it.

 

FORWARD TO PART FOUR

BACK TO MAIN COLEMAN PAGE
©JoeColeman.com