The Less I Do, The Better I Get
“I certainly don’t Google my name hoping to discover a buzz. That idea makes about as much sense to me as sitting down to a family dinner at 16 while peaking on a hit of Windowpane. This might be OK if you’re fairly immune to peer pressure, or if you simply must be certain that your sister really is a hybrid creature, part Bunny Rabbit, part Mariana Fruit Bat. Her sniffling nose twitching, eyes rolled back in her head as she hangs upside down from the dining room chandelier sucking the marrow from a chicken’s broken leg bone. Otherwise, just drop it and forget that I ever brought the idea up.”—Ted Jouflas
Desperado Shindig
By Ted Jouflas
PHOENIX Arizona—(Hubris)—August/September 2024—My work in comics is very rarely, if ever written about. Not to say that it never is, but years can pass between mentions in the press, on websites, or in a tweet.
I certainly don’t Google my name hoping to discover a buzz. That idea makes about as much sense to me as sitting down to a family dinner at 16 while peaking on a hit of Windowpane. This might be OK if you’re fairly immune to peer pressure, or if you simply must be certain that your sister really is a hybrid creature, part Bunny Rabbit, part Mariana Fruit Bat. Her sniffling nose twitching, eyes rolled back in her head as she hangs upside down from the dining room chandelier sucking the marrow from a chicken’s broken leg bone. Otherwise, just drop it and forget that I ever brought the idea up.
So, a few weeks back, I was perusing the website known as “The Comics Journal” when I stumbled across a review of a book titled “American Comics: A History,” by Jeremy A. Dauber, a professor at Columbia University.
As I read the review, I was surprised to see that the critic mentioned my work as being undeservedly included in the book, because no one has ever heard of it. In fairness to this critic, he doesn’t single me out. He names five other authors in the same breath, so this isn’t personal, it simply reveals a curious orthodoxy. It is the canonical certainty that finds its way into every art form, like a weasel in the fruit shed, where the same few artists are written about over and over and over again. And goodness, gracious, tinkled on sputtering balls of fire! Is it ever boring or what?!
The critic also mentioned that the 572-page tome doesn’t contain a single illustration. Quite odd given the subject, and since I am of the same mind as Alice, that what is the use of a book, without pictures or conversation? I certainly wasn’t going to be spending $35.00 on a copy to find out what it says about my comics. It might be cruel!
Curiosity did eventually get the best of me, so I made a few phone calls to the sort of bookstores that would carry this book, and EUREKA! Armed with my smart phone, I would browse the store, find the book, check the index and, when the coast was clear, photograph the page. Off I went like an international spook, and this is what I found on page 386.
“This anarchy of image can have thematic resonance: the power of Ted Jouflas’ Filthy comes less from the strong poetic rhythm and form it displays than the surreal, sometimes collage based, sometimes blunt black and white swirling drawings of protagonists losing their minds (unless these are the clawing, rotted minds they already possess.)”
A tip of my Stetson and a heartfelt thank you to Jeremy Dauber for reading one of my books, understanding its essence, and thinking it worthy of inclusion in his history. I’m very grateful. I’ve always liked comics. Which is why, I continue to occasionally make some of them. But the thing I don’t like about the comics world is that it is far too often like dirty little children, rolling around on a tree house floor, fighting over a Red Devil Marble.
Ted Jouflas
I graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1982. In July of 2022, 40 years after my commencement, and 151 years after its founding, S.F.A.I., the oldest art school in the United States west of the Mississippi, closed permanently due to financial mismanagement. (Please read my humorous, illustrated essay, “ R.I.P. S.F.A.I. ” on this tawdry topic in the September/October issue of Hubris.) Throughout the 80s, I exhibited work in group and one person shows in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York; receiving grants from the Koret Foundation and Foster Goldstrom, and awards from Henry T. Hopkins, the Director of SFMOMA and Phyllis Kind, the Director of Phyllis Kind Gallery, Chicago and New York. At some point during the early 80s, I started working as a freelance illustrator. Initially, this work was made for “punk art” types of publications, of which, at this juncture in time, I can no longer recall the names. (I think one of them was named “Storms of Youth,” but don’t hold me to it.) Eventually, I started getting editorial illustration work for various “alternative” news weeklies and magazines. I also began making illustrations for glossy music and fashion magazines such as Raygun, Rolling Stone, and SPIN. My work has been featured in American Illustration 12 times. In 2001 I was honored with the top award for illustration by AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts). I illustrate A.S. Hamrah’s essays on film for The Baffler. In the late 80s, just as my fine art career was becoming as thin as champagne on slate, I got involved in “alternative” (there’s that word again) comics. At the time, this seemed to make sense. Primarily because my work was already narrative and sometimes included written text. So, writing short stories and illustrating them seemed like a natural and smart idea. It wasn’t. Like the art world, the world of comics is filled with honors, fame, I can’t even think of a third thing, and nowhere near the money. Initially, my short stories appeared in various issues of Robert Crumb’s WEIRDO. Later, they appeared in other anthologies in the United States, Belgium, and France. In the late 90s, Fantagraphics published my “graphic novels” Scary! and Filthy. Then, in 2004, they also published a one shot illustrated poem masquerading as a comic book titled APE. From 2016 through 2020, my comics appeared regularly in The American Bystander. I have a separate, extensive, and impressive resume detailing the history of my “day jobs,” which run the gamut from Dishwasher in a Chinese Restaurant to Assistant Assistant (that’s right, TWICE, like N.Y.N.Y.) Manager in a Five Star Hotel: find the complete list on my website. And, if you’re so inclined, please follow me on Instagram (@tedjouflas).