PART I : Interview with Larry Marder

Larry Marder interviewed by Jeremy York, 9 November 91.

JY : I'm curious how you explain TOTB to people who've never seen it before
and people who've probably never read comics much since they were kids.

LM : Well, that's a problem, it's always been a problem, because Beanworld
is the exact opposite what they call in Hollywood "a high concept" :
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Superman, Batman, Swamp Thing.

You almost know from hearing the title itself what it means.  Beanworld is
almost impossible to describe in the sense that you almost can hand somebody
the comic book and say "well, here, you read it and you figure it out."  But
what I usually say... well usually I just babble -- but what I usually say is
that it's, um, a comic book about a little tribe of hunter/gatherers who think
that they live in the center of the universe and are thoroughly obsessed with
their food chain.  At that point usually regular people, their eyes glaze over
and they go "um-hm, well, gee, can you make a living doing that?"

It's really tough.  Like I said, it's the opposite of a high concept and it's
not an easy thing to describe.  I don't do it very well.  cat yronwode does a
much better job.

JY : What about when you talk to people who are more into the conventional
comics world?

LM : They're even worse, because comics are so categorized that they're used
to saying "this is a book, it's kinda like X-Men" or "this is a book, it's
kinda like Batman" or you can say "well, Lobo, that's kinda like Wolverine".
Uh, Beanworld's not kinda like anything, so therefore it's unclassifiable and,
uh, I mean it's not as bad as it used to be because Beanworld has been around
long enough now that people have at least gotten used to the fact that it
exists.  But for example, in the early days when Beanworld just first came out,
and Don Thompson (editor of the Comics Buyers Guide) did this thing where he
went through every single comic book that was being published and gave it a
letter grade like in school, A through F.  He didn't grade Beanworld, because
he said that Beanworld can't be graded because it is unlike any other thing in
the market, and therefore it wouldn't fit into the curve.  Now, we've reached
the point where people know that it's oddball, they know that it's out there,
but it's kinda like "ya gotta read Beanworld, it's not like anything else."
Almost every book that *is* like something else puts out some kind of hype
saying "oh, you gotta get this new mutant book, it's unlike anything else" --
but of course, it's exactly like everything else.  There are very few books
that are unclassifiable, I think, and Beanworld is one of them.  Beanworld is
one of those books where people either like it or they intensely dislike it.
I haven't personally met very many people who are middle of the road, they go
"oh, that's an ok book"

JY : When you were giving out the first photocopies of the draft of the first
issue, did you really feel like it would go anywhere at that time?  What were
your aspirations?

LM : Nah, I really don't think that I thought it was going to go anywhere.
It's almost hard for me to remember what I really thought at the time, but
when I first...I was just motivated to work on this stuff all the time, and
I finally reached the point where the first Beanworld story was essentially
finished -- what turned into TOTB #1.  It was different, and that's described
in the trade paperback epilogue.  When I was handing it out, I kinda just
wanted to get some reaction from people, find out whether it's like really any
good or not.  I really didn't think at the time that it would be published.
I certainly didn't think that 10 years later I'd be in the situation in the
comic book business, have the position in the comic book business that I have
today.  I really didn't anticipate that.  I just was hoping that I wasn't
wasting my time.

If everybody had said to me, "This really stinks, go home, kid," I still would
have worked on it anyway.  But I was afraid...there was a guy here in Chicago,
his name was Henry Darger, and he was this crazy artist that worked for like
some 60 years creating this entire universe.  I mean, he produced a book, these
journals of these worlds that he had invented that were like, tens of thousands
of pages long, and he drew and painted these incredible scrolls and things, and
he never showed it to anybody during his entire lifetime.  His work was
discovered when he was so old that he had to be put into a nursing home. They
opened his apartment and here was all this amazing stuff.
[Larry notes: Darger's 13 volume epic work had the hefty title of "The
Adventures of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the realms of the Unreal or
the Glandelinian War Storm or the Glandico-Abiennian Wars, as caused by the
Child Slave Rebellion."  It was 19,000 typewritten pages long.  In addition
there were 87 murals on scrolls and 67 smaller paintings.] I just didn't want
to turn into a guy like that, I felt that I was really, a little bit, headed
towards something like that.  Oh, gosh, at one point, a friend of mine and I
had this screwball idea that when I finished Beanworld we were going to put it
into a big stainless steel cylinder and sink it or bury it somewhere and hope
that it might be found by future archeologists someday .  All kinds of crazy
ideas like that.  And so, in the early 80s I decided that geez, I'm getting a
little weird here, maybe I'd better try showing this to someone, and just see
what reactions I get. I had no idea that it would be published.

JY : When did it start to become clear that you'd created something with a life
of its own, that it was out of your control in some sense?

LM : Well, what happened was in the summer of 1983, um, well, let me back up
a little bit.  In 1982,  the first time I showed it to people, it was the first
draft of Beanworld No. 1, a 32-page comic story.  I xeroxed it and paper
clipped it together and handed it out at the Chicago Comicon. I got very very
positive feedback from Jim Shooter  who was Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics
at the time.  Somewhere along the line, over that following winter, I decided
that when the next summer convention comes along, I'm going to see if I can get
even more feedback.  The advertising agency where I worked, they had gotten a
new xerox machine that did 11" x 17" artwork.  By xeroxing both sides of
11" x 17" paper  and folding them in half, I realized I could make little
8 1/2" x 11" comic books, the same size as Elfquest. So I took the 32 page
story and broke it up into 8 page chapters.  I created a new splash page for
each 8 page booklet. I put a title logo on the front and a little indicia on
page 2, stating Published by the Beanworld Press (these were things I had
just made up), and stapled them all together.  I put them together in little
packages, and all of a sudden Beanworld stopped looking like a proposal for
a comic book. It now looked like a collection of giant-size  mini-comics.
The Beanworlds looked finished, they looked like finished entities, and so
then, I had another crazy idea, that from this point forward, I would do
Beanworld as little 8 page books and give them away to whoever wanted to
get them.

And that's what I did. I put a little survey in there, called it The Bean Poll,
and a note that read "Would you like to receive, absolutely FREE the next issue
of Beanworld? If you fill out this survey and returned it in the enclosed
self-addressed stamped envelope, You will get the next 8-page Beanworld for
at no charge. No salesman will call." At this point, I was about
half-way through what turned out to beTOTB #2. I think
there were 6 or 7 little booklets in the "It's Weird! It's Cool! It's Free!"
Beanworld sample packages Cory and I handed out at the Chicago Comicon in 1983.
I think I assembled about 20 of these packages and gave them away. Of course
a month went by, two months went by, I never heard from anybody.  So I figured
I'm not going to hear from anybody this year, I'll just keep on working.  Then
I got a letter from cat yronwode, who was at that point was writing comic
book reviews in her "Fit to Print" column for the Comics Buyer's Guide.  She
sent this really nice note, saying that she really liked Beanworld and she
would be reviewing it in an upcoming issue of the Comics Buyer's Guide.  In
those days, I didn't even know what the Buyer's Guide was!  It just so
happened that my friend, John Hatton, [Larry notes : At the time he lived
in Connecticut, now he lives in Vermont. He's the guy who made up my mid-70s
nickname, "Beanish."   His was "Capt'n Hats"] Well, Hatton was visiting us
and we went over to the best comic shop in the city, Larry's Comic Shop, to
see if they could help me locate this thing called the Buyer's Guide. They
had a big stack of them,  and we opened one up, and sure enough, there was
this glowing review of Beanworld by cat yronwode.

She misunderstood what I was doing, because on the self-addressed stamped
return envelope, I had written "# 409" in the lower left hand corner. This was
for the mailman, it was my apartment number; but she decided that she had
Beanworld package #409, and that I was giving hundreds of these these sets
away. She basically wrote "I don't know who this Marder guy is, I think he's
kinda crazy, because he's giving away this Beanworld stuff, and it's pretty
good. I suggest that you send him some money and he'll send you something
back."   At that point, that's when Beanworld took off and had a life of its
own.  I started getting all kinds of money in the mail, and I decided, what
the hell, I'm gonna finance this and keep this going for as long as I can,
because I could always sneak in and out of the office early in the morning,
before anyone else showed up for work, and keep printing Beanworld booklets
on the xerox machine at the ad agency.  So, that's what I did.

I started collecting the names and addresses of letter-writers who might
enjoy Beanworld from the letter columns of my favorite comics.
So I sent Beanworld packages to fans that I found in the pages of Cerebus
and Mars [Larry notes : that was a wonderful comic from First. I really liked it
a lot at the time]. Even the X-Men!  And sure enough, people
would send The Bean Poll stuff back, and often they'd even send me money,
They'd write, "Gee, I really like this comic, I like this concept, please
keep me on your mailing list."  In six months I had a mailing list of almost a
hundred people.  Every time I finished an 8 page chapter, I'd assemble 'em
and  stuff 'em in envelopes and mail 'em all out. It was getting ridiculous.
And expensive!.  But I knew something was happening, because the people that
liked it were the right people.  It became apparent over the winter of
1983-1984 that Beanworld had some commercial potential.

That was a very exciting time in comics when the direct sales market
was establishing itself. Dave Sim's company, Aardvark/Vanaheim, was in
the vanguard of the exploding, creator-owned black and white comics movement.
It looked like the sky was the limit. And so I began becoming very optimistic
about the fact that Beanworld might actually be published.

What happened next was that in the spring of 1984, there was the Petuniacon
Convention.  It was wrapped around Dave Sim and Cerebus. It was to be in
Oakland CA over an Easter weekend.  The con advertised the appearances of about
40 creators. Most of the leading lights of the alternative B&W comics movement
were going to be there.  At this point, I was corresponding with many of these
creators, and I thought, "Well, I think I'd like to go to this convention."
So Cory and I  took our vacation and went west to Petuniacon...A lot of
wonderful things happened there.I went to Petuniacon as a fan who had this
free Beanworld fanzine, and when I left I had a great deal with Eclipse.
It's kinda been uphill ever since!  I've been lucky.

JY : That's great.  If you don't mind changing direction, I'm curious if you
have any children of your own.

LM : No, I don't.

JY : Because you certainly seem to enjoy or appreciate children, judging by the
"Cutie" plotline...

LM : I enjoy *other* people's children. (laughs).  I do enjoy children a lot,
but I don't have any, and I don't really plan on having any, but I like being
around 'em.

JY : Cats make good surrogates for children, I think.

LM : Yes.  Yes they do.  Much of what goes on with the
Cuties has been based on my sister's son, who was born right around the same
time that I introduced the Cuties into the comic, and I get a lot of ideas from
him.  Now, of course, he's growing up faster than the Cuties themselves, but
she's got another boy now, so I pay a lot of attention to them, and the things
that they say, and also things that my cousin's children, and my friends'
children do and say.  I kinda collect those things, I get to observe them,
from a short uncle distance, parental proximity is too close.  Parents have to
worry about disciplining children, and keeping them safe. I get to just kind
of pick and choose from what I see.

JY : What do kids think of TOTB, and do you have them in mind at all when you
write it?

LM : Generally, I really don't.  When I first started doing Beanworld, I was
doing it for myself.  When it became apparent to me that it was going to be
published, I just assumed that even though it was cutesy-looking, and
the art was very simple, I assumed that this was going to be primarily read by
adults.  And that was true at first; when it became apparent to me that I had
a much younger readership was I was at Wondercon, which is also held in
Oakland, in 1988, and Leticia Glozer, who is cat yronwode's younger sister,
suggested that I take a box of Beanworlds down to the convention and just
start giving them away, just for the hell of it, as a free sample thing.
I thought that was a pretty good idea.  So I did it.  One of the things
that happened, that became apparent immediately, within like 2 or 3 hours,
was that little kids, and by that I mean 8-12, who would never buy a B&W comic,
but would take one for free, read them, and they came back right away, wanting
to know more about Beanworld and how they could get it and what was going on.
And so it became very apparent to me very quickly that the story line that I
was doing was accessible to them on an immediate level.  That was very
interesting information to me at the time.

The second thing that happened was about the same time, I think, was when I
started doing the Do-It-Yourself-Beanworld contest, where I started getting
entries from five year olds, six year olds, whole families.  A whole envelope
with enties from the father, from the mother, and a couple from the children,
all the way from teenagers down to pre-schoolers.  Which is always such an
amazing image to me, I don't know, somebody bringing home Beanworld and
everybody getting a bunch of xeroxes and the whole family sitting around and
doing these things, just astounds me.  It's one of those really really nice
things that has happened that I never anticipated.  When I first started doing
D-I-Y-Beanworld, I was just trying to figure out a way to fill up four pages
of the book and not have to do any work!  (laughs) But it turned into something
completely different, and so that's when it became apparent to me, and I have
learned subsequently that many adult Beanworld fans read the comics to their
children as bedtime stories. It's very very accessible to children because
it operates  on two levels.  The children obviously only understand the most
simplistic surface level, but that's how Rocky and Bullwinkle and Maurice
Sendak stories work.  These stories are accessible to children at one level
but there's obviously a deeper second or maybe even a third level that the
parent enjoys.  As opposed to a children's book, like a Disney liscenced
story book that only operates at the child's level.

JY : Were you a comics fan when you were a kid?

LM : Oh, yeah.  I started liking comics before I could read.  I can remember
being, maybe 5 years old, and having a Superboy comic in my hand somehow
and an older kid who was probably 6 or 7, challenging me and telling me that
I didn't know how to read.  And I remember knowing that I didn't know how
to read it, but just loved to look at the pictures of Superboy.

I became pretty fanatical about comics, and I grew up in the late 50's, and
so my parents were very, very influenced by Dr. Wertham and "Seduction of the
Innocent" and all that, they were thoroughly convinced that comics were going to
cause me to grow up and be a juvenile delinquent.  So I wasn't allowed to buy
them, and I wasn't allowed to have them in the house, but I always hung around
the kids who could buy them, so I always read their stuff.  I never really had
any when I was a kid, maybe that's part of the reason that I was so interested
in them, that they were forbidden fruit.  I loved Superman and Batman and
World's Finest; I didn't like The Atom, I didn't like Flash, didn't like Green
Lantern, didn't like Hawkman.  I can remember summer days where there'd be
no new comics, and we wanted to read comics, so we'd wind up reading the
neighborhood girl's comics, Archie and all that.  Just liked the medium.

When I was 11 or 12 was Marvel kinda took off and exploded and took off.
By the time I was in high school, I had no interest in DC comics at all.
I only read Marvels. Around my senior year, this would be '68-'69, I was
loosing interest in Marvel comics too. But that's when the first underground
comics came along.  For a year or so, I didn't read any comics except the
undergrounds. A couple of things caught my attention when I was a sophomore
in college; Barry Smith's artwork in Conan caught my eye, and I thought
"Gee, I want to try to read this, this looks really interesting".  Also
that's when Jack Kirby left Marvel and went to DC and started doing Jimmy Olsen.

I think you had to be there at the time to understand  what an absurd thing it
was for Jack Kirby to be leaving Marvel to do Jimmy Olsen.  Jimmy Olsen
was one of the worst books by what I considered in those days to be the worst
company.  All of a sudden he just "Marvel-ized" DC and so I started paying
attention to what he was doing over there with his Fourth World stuff.

JY : What other sorts of things were you into as a kid?

LM : I was fanatical about a series of prose books called Tom Swift Jr. I
was just nutty about that stuff. They were the adventures of the son of the
original Tom Swift.  He invented a flying laboratory and a flying submarine,
I can't even remember half the inventions that he had. Each book stood
alone, but there was also continuity from book to book. Tom Swift Jr.was
receiving messages from Dimension X or Planet X or something, and
each book they would learn a little bit more about that ongoing sub-plot.
I must have followed that stuff for about two or three years, and as I said
I was just crazy about it. I think there was a better sense of continuity in
the Swift books which would have been when I was in 4th, 5th, 6th grade, than
there was in any sort of comic book at that time.  I think that that's were I
got my real love of foreshadowing and pacing, when I was a kid, in the Swift
books may show up in Beanworld.  I think that comes maybe more from
that stuff than any comic that I might have read.

What else did I like?  I don't know, I was just a dumb kid.  I liked Indian
lore, I went to a summer camp in Minnesota, Camp Thunderbird, and I learned
a lot about American Indians and their culture.  That was my first time of
having interest in Native Americans.  Which, is something that I've enjoyed
off and on for all of my life, although it's been pretty steady for the last
ten years.

JY : How did you come to be doing an art exhibition at your old, nursery
school was it?

LM : High school.  Well, I went to my 20th reunion.  One of the women
that I graduated with from high school is now an assistant curator at the
Art Institute in Chicago. The high school had built a nice gallery as part
of a new library. She was the head of the committee to find people to do shows
at the gallery.  At the reunion, she found out about Beanworld,
and she said, would you like to have a show.  At that point, it was like a
year and a half away, so I said sure, sure, no problem.  Essentially forgot
about it, then one day the school called and said "ready for your show?  It's
gotta be up in two weeks"!  (laughs)  Oops.  Scrambled, went through all
my stuff; I have so much stuff lying around, it was no problem digging up
enough stuff to put on a show.  Once I got around to putting it up and
talking to some of the teachers, it became apparent that they were very
excited about what I was doing, and wanted me to start working with
actual classes.  At the rime, I had envisioned myself working with art
classes, but as it turned out, I wound up working with English classes,
doing story-telling, which was a lot of fun.  Took up a lot of time, but
it was a lot of fun.

Coming some day:

	PT II : influences, favorite comics, comics industry, TOTB discussion

	PT III : TOTB discussion, comics industry