Creator Spotlight: Charlie Wise

Hey all!

I’ve decided to start a recurring segment of the blog: Wednesday Spotlights.  As many Wednesdays as I can make it work, I’m going to spotlight someone cool I know or have met around the web, both in the world of webcomics and not.  To inaugurate this section I interviewed Charlie Wise, worker of libraries, disc jockey, creator of comics and webcomics, and fan of The Demon Archives 😉

I first internet-met (Intermet? Net-met?) Charlie through the Webcomic Underdogs FB group and Forums, where he has been an active and helpful voice from the start.  Eventually I started reading and commenting on his current webcomic Groovy, Kinda, like he has been reading and commenting on mine.  I’ve learned a lot about webcomics from talking to Charlie and seeing his example, and have benefited a lot from his kind words on our site.  I’ve also received a fair amount of traffic from his site (over 300 visits since the beginning of the year, many of them returning visitors!) since I’ve been commenting over there and he share a link back to my site.  So I think he’s an excellent candidate for a Wednesday Spotlight 🙂

Alright, on to the interview!

D: What was your first experience with comics?

C: Reading or writing?

Reading would be…gosh, the earliest I remember was after we moved to Detroit when I was 7. We would have block parties, where the city would block off either end of our block and all the families would come out and have cookouts and games and stuff. Then, because we had a 2 car garage, everyone would go to our house at the end and watch cartoons on a sheet on the back wall. You could rent 16 mm projectors back then, and there’d be catalogs of 16 mm movies that you could rent through the mail.

Anyway, all the neighborhood kids would watch the movies and then get a bag full of comics after. So I read all the classic Harvey comics: Sad Sack, Baby Huey, Little Audrey, Wendy the Witch. Then we’d go to my aunt’s cottage on Grass Lake in the summer and there’d be a big box of comics for rainy days, and that’s where I discovered all the Archie titles and the great DC Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope comics.

Jeeze, that explains so much about my writing!  I think I made my first comic strip in about 6th or 7th grade. The Schmoe Gang. My friends and I would make our own stories up starring the same cast of characters, some of whom weren’t human. I think I took mine a lot more seriously than they did.

D: I know you’ve been involved in comics for a long time.  Any cool stories from the old days?

C: Umm…sometime around 1990 my friend Sean and I got to go to ProCon, which was a convention just for comics professionals. It was a much smaller industry back then, which is why a schlub like me could go to San Diego and ProCon for free. First thing that happens is we check in and then get into the elevator. This guy gets in, we go up, he leaves, and Sean turns to me and says: “Do you know who that was? That’s Jim Starlin!”

Well, we got over all that pretty quick. We hung out with this young guy who was just starting a comic, something named “Bone,” and I got to swap smokes with Berni Wrightson. I remember “Seduction of the Innocent (Max Allan Collins, Billy Mumy, Miguel Ferrer, among others) blasting out a great version of “Wipe Out” at the dance they held there. I even got to be on a panel at San Diego once, with Brinke Stevens.

D: What’s it like running a used book store?

C: About as much fun as you can have. My sister is my accountant, so she keeps that part running smoothly. I just buy books and talk books with people all day. One minute it’s Lord of the Rings, the next it’s ancient history, then it’s anime or manga. And I get to upgrade all my books as time goes by. I have the nicest collection of hardcovers at home. But no time to read them! Seriously, all my spare time is taken up with Groovy, Kinda. I might manage a movie every now and again, but that’s about it.

D: How does that affect you and your comic?

C: I like to think it makes me a better writer, because I’m around real, live, human beings every day. I’m not home wandering through the fantasy land we call the Internet. Though I really should spend more time doing bookstore stuff. I need to make a new website. But I’d rather put on the headphones and draw.

D: What are all the comic projects you’ve worked on?

C: Oh, let’s see…”The Schmoe Gang,” back in grade school. Then it was “Pink Press,” in high school, for my friend who ran the high school print shop. I think it was called Pink Press ‘cause we had a lot of paper that color. This was before the Internet, when you could just do things without worrying about the political ramifications. After that, it was “Nucleaire Romantiques,” and then “Hallow e’en Boulevard,” the strips I did for my college paper, and for a small weekly paper out here. Then the real comics: Blue Moon, for MU/Aeon Press. I took the first five “Adventures of Lyssa and the Pirates” and self-published it as a graphic novel. I did 2 “Xxxenophile Presents” comics, “Utopia, Unlimited,” for Phil Foglio in the early 90’s. They were X rated Space Operas, starring some of the original Blue Moon characters. Boy, those sold like crazy! I also did some furry comics, “Shanda the Panda” for Mike Curtis. He and I were huge Dan De Carlo fans, and he gave me Dan’s phone number. Dan and I had a couple of really nice phone conversations before he passed away. He even sent me some original art! Then nothing for about 10-15 years or so, until I decided to do “Groovy, Kinda.”

D: Why webcomics?  What makes them special?

C: Because it was the only way I would’ve gotten Groovy, Kinda out there.

First off, the art wasn’t very good in the beginning, so no publisher would’ve touched it. Plus, who’s going to publish this “Archie Comic for grownups,” as one friend called it? And, if I had wanted to get it printed first, I would’ve had to write and edit it down to 32 pages, with a beginning, middle and end. I kind of knew where I wanted to go with it, but I didn’t want to straightjacket it by writing everything out. As it turned out, the story went off in its own direction anyway. But if I had done it with a publisher in mind, it never would’ve gotten to the place it’s at now. Of course, I would’ve upset a lot fewer people, I’m sure!

And webcomics don’t have the pressure that newspaper comics have. If I hit a dry spell (and I do), then I can take some time off. If I want to change the update schedule or stop the comic and do something else, I can. Look at Demon Archives right now. You’ve got a guest artist, something you almost never see in newspaper comics (Well, Frank Frazetta did ghost for Al Capp on Li’l Abner, but the styles matched up fairly well, so I don’t think too many people noticed). Webcomics are cool because they’re easy to get into. You don’t need a publisher, or a printer, or anything. Almost anybody can do one.

Now, that does mean that there’s a lot of bad comics out there. But it also means that there’s some fantastic stuff as well. Stuff that may not appeal to enough people to interest a publisher, but that’s okay. I mean, look at the amazing comics that the Underdogs produce. And they’re cool because of the freedom. They don’t have to be one page, or strip form. They can scroll. They can be color, or black and white, or any combination.

D: One last question, what’s with the creepy clown face avatar you always use?

C: Hey now! Somehow I got this old hardcover “The Big Book of the Real Circus,” from 1961.  I think I found it in a library donation box. So when I needed an avatar I thought: “Gee whiz! Nobody on the entire Internet will have this picture!” And a legend was born.

D: Charlie, many thanks for allowing me to interview you and for sharing some of your stories and thoughts about comics and webcomics.

C: Thanks so much for this! It’s fun. I’ve done hundreds of interviews as a disc jockey, but it hasn’t been until Groovy, Kinda that anyone’s wanted to interview me!

And that concludes our first Wednesday Spotlight.  If you think you or someone you know would be a good fit for spotlight like this, please let me know 🙂

– featured image above from a trip to WindyCon 3 in 1976.  Charlie is the guy at the very top, on the left 🙂