Interviews from APE: Nate Powell

Nate Powell was very unassuming as he sat behind his table at the Alternative Press Expo. He’s been publishing his comics in one way or another since 1992 and has built up an impressive library of work. Powell took the time to talk to Pink Raygun for a few minutes in the early hours of the convention.

Pink Raygun: Could you start out telling us who you are, and a bit about your project?

Nate Powell: My name is Nate Powell, I live in Indiana, I’m a comic book artist and I do a bunch of books. I have a self-contained, autobiographical comics essay about working with people with developmental disabilities and growing older and confronting shifts in ideals that’s printed by Top Shelf Comics called Please Release. I have an omnibus book from Microcosm Publishing called Sounds of Your Name and that collects about twenty different stories done in the last seven or eight years. A lot of them were self-published. I’ve been publishing since 1992, and run a small record label, and I work full time with adults with developmental disabilities.

PRG: What kind of work do you do with adults with developmental disabilities?

NP: My official title is Direct Care Staff, so it varies a lot depending on what a person’s situation is and what they’re doing with their lives. So a lot of work just around their home, on the job, around town. There’s a lot of psychological work, there’s a lot of physical assistance, sometimes job coaching or basically acting as a tool to help another person go through life in a way that they would most effectively want to go through it by themselves.

PRG: You write and draw all of your books. Who are your influences as far as art and writing go?

NP: I would say that writing, my favorite authors are Italo Calvino . I would say a couple of Jeanette Winterson books, and just to keep it really current, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle is the best book I’ve ever read in my life. Comic book artists – John Porcellino, Lynda Barry, Anders Wilson, Farel Dalrymple …I’m mostly mentioning just contemporary folks because I feel that we’re in the middle of a very exciting movement of storytelling.

PRG: What do you mean by a “movement?”

NP: I’d say that the world of independent comics has hit a new head about four years ago that makes it completely self-sufficient, self-contained, and I feel that it’s able to move in a lot of different directions. I feel like there’s more acceptable attitudes toward the state of what is considered a comic. Whether it’s on a formal level, like how something folds or how it’s presented, or whether it physically exists or not. There’s a lot of room for lateral movement and otherwise within independent comics now.

PRG: Can you tell me a little bit about your working process?

NP: In general I spend between a couple of months and four years per story, while I’m doing other stuff, in just the sketchbook and journal stage. A lot of that has to do with taking vignettes from my life or from the world around me, and eventually compiling lists of those vignettes and seeing what works together. Basically from there, coming out with my one line sentence about what I want the story to be about.

And then basically the list winds up being condensed to fit into the scenario and characters that I care about or may have already been drawing…my process becomes the act of re-contextualizing all these little vignettes from the world around me into the way that these characters work. With most of these books, I just went with rough pencils – I pencil maybe twenty minutes per page and about four hours per page inking. I do everything on paper, I only learned how to scan things maybe a year ago.

Personally, I really enjoy the physicality of books, and I enjoy the process of drawing on paper. It’s nothing against technology. Personally, I would love to be able to work some digital greys into my books, but I’m not that concerned about it. I really like having manual black and white. I”m working on a new 200 page graphic novel for Top Shelf that’s coming out next year that’s called Swallow Me Whole, which I’ve already completed the pencils for – about two hours per page, so now it will be a much quicker process through the inks. Other than that, I spend much more time developing the writing than I spend focused on the art.

PRG: It sounds almost like you approach the writing like you were writing a screenplay, creating your log line, structuring your individual scene ideas to fit the concept of your story. Did you get this approach from any sort of screenwriting classes or books?

NP: No, I didn’t even think about the fact that I didn’t know how to write anything at all until about three and a half years ago when I moved into my new home town. I stopped drawing comics for almost a solid year and started looking at the weaknesses of the stories that I had done previously. I pretty much started reading about a novel a week in an attempt to get the concrete-ness back into my stories. Basically that means boiling a story down into twenty key moments, and boiling that into the Big Sentence. I previously had understated how important that is. A lot of it is that I’m sort of a vague, wishy-washy person, and if someone asks me a question, I’ll talk it out for like twenty or twenty-five minutes, so on a personal level I feel that it’s important for me to find that one sentence to sum it up.

PRG: There’s seems to be a lot of interest from Hollywood – snapping up properties left and right. Have you had any of that interest directed toward your work?

NP: Not at all. It would be exciting to see a film-maker that I thought was an exciting human being doing something different with a story I had done, but there’s been no real interest as of yet. In general, I love comics, I love books. I love holding and possessing those things and living inside them. I watch a lot of movies, and I’m profoundly affected by them, but for all their similarities I don’t think of comics as a stepping stone to larger media, or other media even. I definitely create comics for their state as a comic.

PRG: Would you say that your biggest concern is craft over commerce?

NP: Yes. A lot of this comes from a do it yourself, kind of underground, punk culture, and just learning that things can be successful, can be high quality, but also be exactly what you want them to be if you just learn how to do it, and then do it. This is something that I’ve not really ever wanted to shake because it seems to be simple and it makes a lot of sense. I’m a crafty, focused individual.

For more on Nate Powell, his comics and his record label, visit his website.

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