My Inner 7th Grader at APE

The weirdest thing about doing convention interviews is approaching a person or a company I know nothing about. Luckily, most people seem OK with it, and we have a nice chat. Other times, that zit-faced, acid-washed jeans wearing 7th grader I used to be takes over, and it’s difficult to keep the interview going with thoughts like “Are my bangs feathered enough?” and “Is there beef jerky stuck in my teeth?” and “Is my t-shirt on backward?” running through my head. (The t-shirt thing happened on picture day. It was tie-die. Don’t judge me).

One of the cold interviews that went OK was with Brianne Mees. Brianne and her husband Jared operate Tender Loving Empire, an indie publishing company based in Portland, OR, which produces an eclectic mix of media.

Pink Raygun: Can you give us an overview of Tender Loving Empire?

Brianne Mees: My husband and I both run Tender Loving Empire and it’s all hand screenprinted and we do comics, short stories and we also do music. It’s like an artist’s collective, but then my husband hand screenprints everything.

PRG: What motivated you to start Tender Loving Empire?

BM: It started just because we knew so many talented people. Jared’s CD was our first project and he learned how to screenprint because he wanted to do cool packaging for his project. Then we knew so many other people with completed projects who didn’t really have a place to take them that we decided to just take it to the next step and start doing projects for friends and it caught on. The response has been really good.

PRG: Do you actively seek out new artists or do people come to you?

BM: So far people have just come to us, but we have an upload form on our website that allows people to submit stuff and if we like it, then we’ll go ahead and publish it.

PRG: What are you looking for in the projects you publish?

BM: We’re looking for quality fine art, we’re into a lot of comic art. As far as fiction, we’re looking for stuff that’s pretty quirky and unusual. And for music, we tend toward the indie camp, and want to work with really driven musicians who are out there and already have a bit of a fan base.

Tender Loving Empire creator Brian Oaster was also present and talked about his career in cartooning and his webcomic, Misunderstandings Between Friends. It was starting to get busy at the table, so I was only able to croak out a couple of questions.

PRG: Brian, how long have you been working in comics?

Brian Oaster: I’ve been doing my webcomic for a little over a year, almost a year and a half, and we published At Home on the Earth last year and prior to that I was just doing sort of miscellaneous drawings all the time. So, it’s been like a year, year and a half that I’ve been organized and functioning like an actual cartoonist.

PRG: Tell me about your webcomic, Misunderstandings Between Friends.

BO: I publish it three times a week. It probably falls under the category of single panel, meaning there’s no running story, there generally aren’t running characters, each comic strip is it’s own little story or piece of artwork. They’re all ink drawings, and they’re kind of strange. I draw a lot on surrealism. Sometimes it’s funny and sometimes it’s not. I’m going for interesting drawings more than anything.

Brian Oaster’s book, At Home on the Earth, is part of Pink Raygun’s “Couldn’t Make APE?” contest. Click here for details.

Then there are other interviews, like this one with Brandon Bird. Bird is an artist I’m relatively familiar with and whose work I enjoy. What’s not to like about a guy who paints Abraham Lincoln in a cage fight or Bea Arthur wrasslin’ a dinosaur?

Based on his paintings, I had a preconception that Bird would be just as lively and eccentric, and when he wasn’t, I didn’t really have anywhere to go. Granted, it was crowded and I had a microphone enabled iPod in his face. In any case, during this interview, I could feel my hair shriveling back into that bad perm as 7th Grade Lisa prepared to pop out and say, “Hey, guys! Guys? Where are you going?” Then my jeans came unpegged and I tripped.

Pink Raygun: Tell me about your artwork.

Brandon Bird: I’m a painter mainly and I do sort of realistic pop are paintings of in general, celebrities and other famous people doing silly or outrageous things that they wouldn’t normally do. Such as Rod Stewart wearing a Strom Trooper outift or Noam Chomsky going out to his pimped out 1970’s super van.

PRG: Where do these surreal images come from?

BB: I guess they’re influenced by watching a lot of TV. Just sort of the detritus of culture, things like supervans and old video games and things like that.

PRG: Do you have a selection process for your celebrity subjects or is it just funny looking people?

BB: Sometimes it’s like lightning, other times I kinda brainstorm and then kind of weed some out or I’ll save them for later like “Oh, I should do a Leonard Maltin piece as soon as I figure out what Leonard Maltin would fit into that would be the funniest.

PRG: I see you also have a Law and Order coloring book.

BB: That’s because I love Law and Order more than life itself. I did a whole Law and Order group art show and made the coloring book for that and started selling some of them and then they showed one on Conan O’Brien, they gave it to Jerry Orbach before he died. And I kept doing Law and Order stuff, like Valentines and t-shirts. I don’t think I’ll ever stop.

To get a better sense of Bird, visit his website, where he has things like the notes from his 6th grade parent-teacher conference and his autographed photo of Warwick Davis. That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t always come through in the interviews, even if 7th Grade Lisa stays in hibernation. I’ll probably still have beef jerky stuck in my teeth, though.

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