One-Man Show
From family life to the Nat Turner story, Kyle Baker makes comics his own way
By Don Waller
"The reason I do the comic books is 'cause it's the only stuff that comes out the way I wanted it to," laughs Kyle Baker, whose graphic novels stretch from The Cowboy Wally Show and the Eisner and/or Harvey Award-winning Why I Hate Saturn (a slashing satire of singles-in-the-city lifestyles), You Are Here, I Die at Midnight, and the revived Plastic Man to illustrating Aaron McGruder & Reginald Hudlin's Birth of a Nation.
The 40-year-old Queens native began his career as an intern with Marvel Comics while still in high school. After landing an inking gig, he worked for Classics Illustrated, drew The Shadow for DC Comics, and cranked out dozens of one-panels, strips, and magazine illustrations before the success of his graphic novels brought him to Hollywood's attention.
"Animation pays a lot more, but there's also a lot more interference," Baker says, chuckling again. "Everything that I've ever done that's been committed to film has been changed 100 percent. Like the Bugs Bunny movie that I worked on for a year, I didn't get any jokes in. But I made more money off that than I made off all my comic books, so it evens out."
It was Baker's inability to secure a syndication deal for the Cowboy Wally strip that led him to render the concept as a graphic novel, but the sheer range of his subsequent books is what led him to brand the material by placing his name above the titles, then venture into the world of self-publishing. "I wanted to own my own stuff, and also to control it," he explains. "What happens when you're part of those machines like DC or Marvel is that, if they don't want to do something - like make toys out of your characters - you're not legally allowed to do so."
His solution? "What I've been doing for the last three years is basically feathering my own nest by having some cartoons that I own."
The first of these efforts was Cartoonist, a collection of one-panels and strips, including the drug-fueled "Myrna Burner, Psychonaut," which Baker describes as "my attempt to do a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers thing. Basically, I just threw a whole bunch of ideas out there to see which one people responded to best, which turned out to be The Bakers."
This strip - focused on the family life of the artist, his wife, and their three young children - has proven so popular that he's turning it into a 96-page color hardcover (due out by the end of this month), including 30 pages of all-new material. "I'm doing The Bakers in hardcover so I can get it into the Barnes & Nobles and the libraries of this world," says the artist. ´´ "Because when I do stuff that isn't targeted to the hardcore audience for comics - which is basically the exact same male-dominated audience it was 20 years ago, only now they're older - I have to get my money from other places. And the style of The Bakers is deliberately very cartoon-y, 'cause it was designed to be sold to TV."
Baker's other current major project, however, couldn't be more different in either artistic style or subject matter. Nat Turner is a straightforward retelling of the story of the slave who led a rebellion in 1831 Virginia that killed 55 people, and who wound up hanged, skinned, castrated, beheaded, and quartered - with his body parts sold as souvenirs - for his efforts.
"When I was in school and read about him, there was little more than one line in a history book," says Baker. "But I was rereading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and there was about a page-long section on Nat Turner, and I thought, 'Hey, that would make a good comic book!' Because one thing you really need for a good comic book is fights and action sequences.
"I did a King David comic book a couple years ago," Baker continues, "and one of the reasons I picked that instead of other Bible stories is 'cause David's the one who fought the most. Somebody like Jesus would make a terrible comic book, because he talked a lot. Same with Martin Luther King - whom I love - but all his great moments are talking."
Baker decided to render the story in an exclusively black-and-white, almost impressionistic style with minimal text - primarily taken from The Confessions of Nat Turner, an 1831 "as-told-to" account by Boston-based physician Thomas Ruffin Gray (William Styron wrote a 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the same title). That's because, Baker says, "I try to make my stuff as easy to read as possible, and I also try to pick the style that'll do the job. I wanted Nat Turner to look like those old photographs I'd been using for research, which tend to be very contrast-y with a hot spot in the middle and kind of hard to make out the details.
"Generally when you're doing a comic book," he adds, "the style is to exaggerate everything to make it more dramatic. In this case, I didn't think you needed to oversell anything. When you've got a baby being eaten by a shark, you don't have to pick a more dramatic angle - from inside the shark's mouth or something. I didn't want to distract people from the story, and I didn't want to pick sides. I just wanted to say, 'Look, this is what really happened.'"
After he finishes Nat Turner, he plans to do another Bakers book, and maybe a King David TV special. The latter book "took a while to find an audience," he says, "because I have a bad habit of picking things that people don't like to talk about - like the sex and violence. I got a call from a Hollywood producer who said, 'We really love King David, and we want to make a movie about it, but we really need to tone down the Israel-Palestine thing.'" Baker laughs.
"But you take that out, and you have no story," he says. "And what appealed to me about the story was that it's topical. When I started it, you had the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky thing - which parallels David and Bathsheba - but then the war broke out, so I made it more about the war in the Middle East. I also made the entire cast brown-skinned, which probably worked against me." He laughs again. "But one of the reasons I did that is 'cause it drives me nuts whenever I see a Bible story where everybody's white. It's bizarre, 'cause all you have to do is turn on the news from the Middle East and see that's not true."
One of the distinguishing characteristics of Baker's oeuvre is his ability to work in a variety of different styles, as evidenced not only in his comics/graphic novels but also on Kylebaker.com, which features loads of exclusive material (one-panels, illustrations, landscapes, caricatures, animated cartoons, and a hilarious "exposé" about the process of creating background art for animated features). As for the wide range of music heard on the site, Baker says, "Oh, I did most of that myself using the GarageBand program."
When it comes to the future of comics and the state of the art, Baker is rather sanguine. "You look at the most successful cartoons, and you don't have to be able to draw anymore - I wonder why I bother." He laughs. "And I don't think you should write about yourself unless you're really interesting - like if you're a woman in Iran or something. At least when I'm writing about myself, I pick the universal stuff, like a baby learning how to walk. I don't write about me negotiating a deal with Disney, 'cause it wouldn't be funny - unless you've tried to negotiate a deal with Disney."
His advice to anyone who wants to get into the comics biz? "I wouldn't recommend it," he says, laughing again. "That said, the really good stuff that's coming out now is probably better than anything I've ever seen in the medium. I really enjoy the Lone Wolf and Cub and the Samurai Assassin series. Those are old, but it's nice they're now available in good editions. And Joe Kubert is still doing great stuff, and he's been at it since the '50s. So the good stuff is really good and the bad stuff is ... worse than ever."Published: 02/16/2006
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