Creator Spotlight: Christopher Ochs

This week’s Spotlight/Interview is with Christopher Ochs, creator of Fantastic Crap Comics (a weekly, long form horror/comedy/sci-fi/mystery pastiche that centers around the fumbling adventures of Architeuthis Joe, giant squid and detective) and fellow Underdog.

Remember, if any of you want to be interviewed/spotlighted, or know someone who would enjoy it, let me know.  This includes people who aren’t webcomic creators!  I just want to spotlight cool people 🙂

D: I assume that you, like most webcomic creators, have another job to support your comic-ing addiction. What do you do?

C: I work at a law firm. Administration. Filing, deliveries, clerical work, all that kind of garbage. Before that I worked at a semi-conductor foundry, which was the worst job I’ve ever had. I’m still looking for something with longevity, where I can make a living and finally stop being horrified of my future.

D: How did you start getting involved in more creative endeavors?

C: I’ve never not been involved in creative endeavors, really. I’ve been in bands and worked on low budget movies in several different capacities, and I’ve also been making comics since was a child. I’ve been working on getting one off the ground for years, but at some point I got sick of all my projects being stuck in the development stage forever and decided I needed something to happen. My degree is in film, and I aspire to make movies, but film making is a collaborative process, and I became tired of people letting me down or flaking on me, which motivated the shift in priorities back to comics. I can’t make a movie by myself, but I CAN make a comic by myself. I decided to read McCloud’s Making Comics, so that I could know the technical aspects of how comics are made professionally, and immediately following that I started working on my first issue.

D: What are some of the projects and things you’ve worked on?

C: My attitude on this may change over time, but right now I regard everything I’ve worked on in the past as the “error” portion of trial and error. While it helped my round out my skill set, a carpenter does not sit upon his shavings, and I think I’ll be better served by being more controlling in regards to what past work I draw attention to. Plus, it’s more fun this way.

D: What is the Portland art community like? Is there a lot of support?

C: An entire book could be written about the art community in Portland, and the truth is you can talk to twelve different people and get twelve different answers, but my experience here has been very negative, and I know I’m not the only one. Portland has a very ‘arty’ reputation, but I’m not sure it deserves it. I think Pharoah Bolding (Another Portland area Webcomic creator) was the guy who said to me that people in Portland won’t support something unless they think they can then brag about it. This was a very concise way to word something I’ve been feeling for years. The attitude here is that you’re not an artist if you expect any form of compensation for your work, and that’s coming from entitled youth who aren’t about to work for free themselves. There are a lot of artists here, and so maybe the real truth is that there just isn’t enough money to go around, since this really is a pretty small city, but no matter how I’ve tried to make it as an artist in Portland I’ve found the experience extremely frustrating. That having been said, I haven’t yet tried to network much within the Webcomic community here, so maybe when I do I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

D: Nick actually recently moved to the Portland area. Any good recommendations for him (both creatively and just for livings)?

C: My Portland advice is that there is only one thing Portland does right, and that’s food. The food culture in Portland is awesome, and you need to hit up The Screen Door on Burnside, Fire on the Mountain, Salt N’ Straw, The Matador, Broder and about a billion other restaurants and carts. Also, Movie Madness over on Belmont, great video store and they have an awesome food cart pod right next door. That’s all I got.

D: Why do you comic? What do you feel it adds to your life? To the lives of your readers?

C: I like telling stories. I’m also about ideas in a big way, but I think, really, my comic is a marriage of the two things I like to do more than anything else; draw, and complain. In a more superficial sense, it’s also a celebration of the things I love, so I think there is probably a lot of psychological release and healing that goes down during my creative process which I may or may not be fully cognizant of. Comics have always just been a kind of compulsion, I’m sure more artists will say something similar. I’ve kinda always just thought it was part of how my mind works. Since high school I’ve really tried my hand at lots of other art forms to try and see what worked best, but for me I think it’s really true that comics are what I do better than anything else. As for my readers, you’d have to ask them. When I consume media I’m not normally very emotionally invested in the narrative, most of the time I’m doing it from a more analytical place, dissecting the ideas at play and appreciating them individually as well as the composition as a whole. When I write a comic, I think I probably just throw some ideas I think are interesting together and then smooth it out a little with some dark humor and pessimism. I have no reason to believe that anyone would ever want to read that.

D: What do you wish comic readers knew/understood/grokked about the comic making process?

C: Well, my process is still completely by hand, I don’t do anything digital at this point, so for me, it’s a pretty complicated, lengthy process, with all kinds of steps. I don’t particularly care if people know that or if they don’t, but when people have asked about it, they’ve always seemed surprised and interested how complicated it actually is. I really don’t care how much people know about the process, what I really wish is that they valued the art form more. Right now Western culture does not value art at all, and we reward bad art almost exclusively. This is like the intellectual version of that reverse evolution machine from the Super Mario Brothers movie. If I had my way, people would respect art in general a lot more, and I think the world would be a better place.

D: Any advice for other comic creators?

C: I don’t feel like I’m qualified to be giving anyone advice on anything, but I will say be good to one another. Be nice to other comic guys and gals, try to make friends and help anyone out any time you can. I think we should all be trying to help one another, because “it’s dangerous to go alone.”

D: Any fun thoughts or stories for sharing?

C: Geez, way to put a guy on the spot, Dan. I guess the only thing I can think of is this; At the time that I was making my first issue I was living in an apartment with two room mates and working at a coffee shop. I would run on my treadmill for an hour every day, I ate almost nothing but toast, and I watched two horror movies every night. In a very sad way, I now acknowledge that those were “the good old days.”

Thanks again Chris for being willing to share your thoughts!  Nick, make sure you try out those places in Portland and report back 😉