Reader, I could extol the many virtues of this piece, or I could get right down to it.
Today’s guest is the brilliant Ben Wilgus: an award-winning cartoonist, writer, editor, and – what timing! – birthday-haver. He is deeply powerful and dearly beloved, and this conversation was just a huge treat. Brew yourself a tasty tea and sit back with us, won’t you?
Good morning, Ben! Today, we are indulgently imagining a stroll through a sunny botanical garden. Please join me in observing this very small cactus.
I am picturing the very small cactus that sits in a place of honor in my Animal Crossing house. Internally, the remainder of this conversation will be conducted whilst taking afternoon tea in that sunny digital courtyard, discussing the price of turnips in between other business.
Our stonks have been doing a deep dive for two weeks now and I am surviving only on the kindness of friends. ALAS.
So, first of all, I need to know and the people deserve to know. Please, I implore you: explain everything about this piece. No stone left unturned, if you will.
Gale, it is hard to know where to begin.
This was drawn as an entry for the “Monthly Gargoyles Contest” — a community challenge in which artists would all draw a new work based on the same theme, and then those works were voted on. This particular entry was drawn for the September 1999 theme, “Mystery Gargs,” which confusingly enough was supposed to be Gargoyle versions of comic characters. I didn’t know that I was a tiny gay, but I was definitely a tiny gay, and so immediately hauled out my Tank Girl trades and began the process of selectively copying from them in order to create this work of unblinking shamelessness.
Like…there’s so much going on here.
The process of creating a gargoyle version of an extant character — of “gargi-fying” them, if you will — is more complicated than one might think. Will you preserve the existing skin color? What about the interior of the wings? Will you choose from the library of established wing-shapes — bat, feathered, pterodactyl — or strike out into new territory? Will there be horns or ridges on the brow? The knees and elbows? The joints of the wings? Will the wings feature small grasping claws at their apex? Will the tail taper to a point, or will it bear spikes or a hard knob of bone?
And then, of course, there are potential modifications to the costume. As you can see, I elected to accent the inhuman aspects of this transformative interpretation of Jamie Hewlett’s Tank Girl, including details such as a tail-warmer and wing piercings. There’s no “right” way to do this, but personally, I feel it’s best to lean in to the theme, rather than fight against it.
And finally, there’s the style in which this was drawn. Those familiar with my body of work will see that while this is easily identifiable as a 90s Wilgus ‘Shop, certain elements borrow heavily from Hewlett’s Tank Girl comics. I’d say the hair, the lettering, and the smoke plume are the most obvious.
Please note that I had to go digging around through Archive.org to double-check my memory here, and so can present you with this contemporary artifact:
If you don’t mind my interjecting for JUST a moment… first of all, I adore all of this. It truly encapsulates the mood of a generation. The *laff*. The ^_^. But also, your signature? It’s looking at me. Right at me.
Sometime in middle school, I began signing all documents with a smiley face after my name, heavily influenced by Wakko Warner and by my own desire to be fully on my bullshit at all times. It’s difficult to replicate with a keyboard, but the closest interpretation would be
<=’P~
Only….smiley-er.
When first establishing myself as an online entity, I created the handle “Al =)” for use on the Gargoyles Fan Website and Station 8, the two primary nodes of Gargoyles fandom at the time. While I dropped the smiley face from my signature on school papers, it became cemented at the core of my fandom identity. Over time, it evolved into the icon found in my signature on this piece.
That is wonderful.
You drew this in the year of our Lord nineteen-ninety-nine, a time which witnessed the release of Adobe Photoshop 5.5, some gentle concerns about computer programming, and the birth of The Matrix, among other things. What was the Gargoyles fan community like? How did you get into it? How did your participation in online fandom affect your creative process? Basically, please tell me everything about your Internet Experience.
So I suppose I’ll bring you with me to the first step on the road to this image: the 1994 debut of the Disney animated show, Gargoyles. I was thirteen, I had spent most of middle school devoted to Star Trek: The Next Generation, I loved cartoons but wished that the Disney Afternoon wasn’t so silly, I was the kind of baby nerd who only cared about adult characters and wanted all of them to be low-key wrestling with an existential crisis at all times. As such, Gargoyles and all of its angsty byzantine melodrama may as well have been crafted for me personally. Also, nearly all of the characters were cool monster people with wings and tails and huge fun-to-draw feet so: flawless, perfect, not a single complaint.
The show debuted right as I was starting my freshman year of high school, and it just-so-happened that I lucked into a school that had some pretty unusual infrastructure for the mid-90s: Internet-enabled computers which we could use to do basically anything, as long as we were comfortable doing it in a public place with teachers potentially lurking behind us. I was a giant-ass nerdlord with zero shame, so I immediately plugged “Gargoyles” into Alta Vista and thus, propelled myself directly into fandom.
Fast-forward through four years of exactly what you’d expect: Geocities fansite, chatting with college students on primitive auto-reloading HTML “comment rooms,” being taught how to use ICQ and IRC and then sneaking out of bed to yell about shipping at midnight. I was gifted non-Geocities webspace by one of the guys who ran a Gargoyles fansite I was heavily involved in, and I taught myself all of the essentials of 90s fandom: elaborate website layouts built on HTML tables, Webring curation, and stealing time on the yearbook computers to color fanart in Photoshop.
Tank Garg was drawn during my freshman year at NYU, at the cusp of my very first fannish upheaval. Gargoyles was my first fandom, and shall always remain dear to my heart. But the second was about to arrive.
You very kindly provided me with a selection of your old fanart, and between this and the timeframe we’re looking at, I think I have a guess as to what that second fandom might have been.
Ben… were you, like, super into Harry Potter?
I super was!!!!
And here’s the thing: when it comes to every other fandom I’ve ever been involved with, no matter how nuts things got or how much time has gone by, I’ve held onto the little nugget of sincere affection that got me to care about the thing in the first place. Like, I have made myself cry with decade-old fan soundtracks.
But that’s not how it’s panned out in this specific case, for a lot of reasons. Most of which you can probably guess.
I was deeply, deeply involved in Harry Potter fandom in my early twenties, starting while I was in college and carrying into my first year as an Adult With A Real Job. I ran an invitation-only fanwork archive which gained some notoriety at the time. I made a lot of wickedly smart friends. For the first time in my life, I spent hours and hours on in-depth conversations about the craft of writing as I discussed the books themselves and the stories my friends and I built around them.
But then, as the series progressed, my ability to reconcile my idealistic hopes with the reality of the text eventually collapsed. I remember having pretty serious arguments with close friends and colleagues regarding the morally bankrupt architecture of JKR’s wizarding world, the disturbing choices she made regarding the fates of her characters, and what their stories revealed about her thoughts on what makes for a good and honorable life. I read the seventh book on a bus coming home from Otakon, and within a year I think I’d given all of my copies of the series away. I went from the white hot center of HP fandom to basically never wanting to talk to anyone about it at all.
Needless to say, I was not particularly surprised when JKR took a hard turn into TERF-dom. And by then, I’d long-since shed any emotional attachment to the series. But looking back, it really does feel like a break-up with a shitty ex. On the one hand, I’m obviously better off, and as time goes on I’m uncomplicatedly grateful to my past self for deciding to leave. But on the other hand, I invested so much time and thought into this world and these characters, I held them very close and dear in my heart during a formative time in my life. And narrative is so important to me! It’s what I do for a living! It takes up more room in my head than basically anything else! I know I have a lot of company in this, but it’s unsettling when one of your formative texts turns out to have been poison all along.
Thank you, sincerely, for opening up about this. I know we here at the Fanart Emporium have historically kept things Light and Fun, but being emotionally invested in fandom can also have its complications – and I’ve definitely had to grapple with this as well.
The important thing is, all of these experiences made you, and you’re amazing!! The conclusion to your epic queer time-travel duology, Chronin, was released in late 2019 (available at your favorite indie bookstores and comic shops, everybody go read it). You’ve spoken in other interviews about how creating these books over the course of a decade helped you to kind of examine your own personal experiences and process what you were going through in your life, and I love that Chronin is out there in the world for other people who might be at similar points on their queer discovery paths now (although hopefully with less timeline displacement). Would you say that your teen fanart served a similar exploratory purpose for you? Were there themes that you noticed yourself coming back to?
God, it absolutely did, although of course I had no awareness of this at all at the time! Zero!! The idea of “slash” shipping (ie what we called The Gay Stuff back in the day) had like….never really occurred to me before I got to college. And then I read a Harry/Draco fic by Astolat, mostly at random, and was immediately like…oh. OH.
But I was still almost completely detached from and ignorant of the culture and community of actual queer people. So I’d latch onto visual conventions of how characters were drawn and the kinds of clothes they wore or situations they were in, because I found them compelling, and incorporated a mishmash of all of it into the fanart I drew. And looking back, it’s some gay shit! Often also kinky as hell on top of everything else! And I had no idea! Please imagine 20-year-old Ben drawing Draco Malfoy in a BDSM collar while thinking about how he’s obsessed with Dreamy Rival Harry Potter and how maybe they could go to a loud club and dance to Depeche Mode someday, all while thinking, “This is nice also I am completely straight and boring and none of this has anything to do with me :)”
[screaming]
In defense of Foolish Young Ben, though, I did encounter some pretty brutal gatekeeping at the time, mostly from straight women “””friends””” telling me that I was being gross to be so interested in gay culture. I’m pretty sure they thought I was trying to fetishize these poor gay boys (fictional or otherwise) but looking back, it’s so obvious that I was a tiny gay moth drawn to the flame of queer culture and queer content. I just had no idea what I was doing!
So I drew a lot of intensely horny deeply queer fanart and hibernated inside of it for…. *coughs*adecadeortwo
Let they without sin, and so such. BUT HEY, SPEAKING OF FANART? You recently published an absolute powerhouse of a Star Trek group anthology, Deep Space Zine. So it’s safe to say that you are still an active Fan Of Things! Do you feel like the way you’ve participated in fandom has changed over the years? What do you hope for, when it comes to the future of fondly yelling about media online?
For better or worse, I’ve always been someone who takes fandom Very Seriously. When I was younger and learning the basic craft of drawing and writing, and when I was most in need of connecting to new people whom I shared common interests with, dumping a ton of energy into fanwork and fan communities made a ton of practical sense, in addition to being very fun.
These days? It’s hard to say! Deep Space Zine was a very fun one-off project to organize, but my own comic for it was very short and pretty limited in scope. I’m a slow writer and I don’t draw much anymore! And since my version of being deep in the bowels of a fandom usually involves some overly-ambitious deeply-sincere long-term project, there’s a level of investment to that which…you know, it’s difficult to predict! Will I ever care enough about someone else’s characters again to spend that much of my time and my energy on building new stories for them? Will I ever have another piece of fiction speak to me on so deep and visceral a level that I feel no choice but to hurl myself into it like some kind of narrative leaf pile? Dang, I dunno!!!
Here’s how I think about fandom: a lot of the time, when someone falls way down the rabbit hole, two things are happening.
First, something in the text itself is intensely compelling to them in a way that sticks — a character, a relationship, a quirk of the world building, something grabs them by the shoulders and drags them in, something clicks in a way that can feel out of their control. It’s like being haunted, it’s a hungry ghost that wants to be fed, and so they go online to find other people who are just as invested and who will talk to them about this thing for hours and hours and hours, for months and years.
At the same time, in my experience, people who go hard on fandom are often in a period of personal transition. Sometimes they’re new parents, reading buckets of fanfic while isolated at home or up in the middle of the night. [Ed: JUST @ ME NEXT TIME] Sometimes they’ve just started school, or moved back to childhood home. Often, they’re starting to feel a tickle of discomfort regarding some aspect of their gender or their sexuality — or both! And in all of these cases, folks find it comforting and validating to spend time with a community of people who are also feeling raw and intense and a little bit messy, who are often also processing their trauma or their isolation or their longing or their frustrations or their unvarnished horniness through the lens of fanwork.
In my opinion, nearly all personal creative work is therapeutic to some degree! We process our thoughts and feelings and experiences through fiction! And with fandom, this is like….doubly so. Often it’s an alternate version of ourselves that we’re trying on for size, either through the work we’re creating or the community we’re building or, most often, a combination of the two.
So to come back around to your question: right now, what I’m trying to do is harness that Big Fandom Energy — and the sort of shameless, earnest investment that goes with it — and channel it into my own original work. Basically, I want to look my own bullshit directly in the eye, make my peace, and then convince other people to get on board with me. I still want to yell fondly about media online, but I also want to take all the lessons I’ve learned from my time in fandom and use that power for good. And by good, I mean the most self-indulgent nonsense possible.
This really resonates! Damn!!!
You know it’s funny, looking at all this old art makes me think about how I don’t really draw for fun anymore — in fact, I hardly draw at all! I think the process of finishing Chronin kind of broke my relationship with making art, and I’m still figuring out whether and how to repair it. I wonder if the key is to do a similar thing with my drawing as I’m doing with my writing. What do I enjoy? What makes me excited to pick up a pencil? Is there anything like that these days? Like I look at that Tank Garg drawing and clearly, clearly I was having the time of my goddamn life. I wonder if I can figure out how to get back there again!
I feel this, truly. For me, there’s this series of emotional ebbs and flows that comes with creative practice. Sometimes you just have to live your life and let the joy come back in its own time, right?
Any advice for young people who really love storytelling and diving head-on into piles of research?
I’m a big advocate of starting broad and then narrowing as you go. There’s a temptation to just jump right to the more hardcore possible texts to prove to yourself that you’re doing “real” research but in my experience, you’ll get way more out of those denser sources if you have a solid foundation in the basics. So for instance, if you’re researching like… god, I dunno, what it’s like to be a professional marine biologist? Go ahead and start by watching a bunch of general audience YouTube videos from aquariums! And then maybe see if anyone in those videos have their own channel or their own blog where they go into more detail or talk at greater length. See if there are books or social media accounts or documentaries or other sources they reference or recommend, and go look at those. By now, you’ll probably have a much clearer and more specific idea in your head of what kind of professional marine biologist you’re actually interested in — like, maybe it turns out there’s a specialization you hadn’t even been aware of but that’s perfect for your project. And you’ll also have a more sophisticated sense of what the search terms are that will get you the thing you’re looking for. So at this point, not only can you find better stuff at the library or in online databases or wherever else you’re looking, you also are better equipped to sniff out people who try and sell themselves as experts but don’t know what they’re talking about.
Also, unless the thing you’re researching is the kind of controversial that gets articles vandalized, turns out Wikipedia is a great way to dip your toes into a topic. In my experience, the vast majority of Wikipedia articles are well-sourced and accurate, and can help a ton when it comes to getting your brain around a new topic. It should never be your only source but it’s a fantastic springboard!
What are you into now?
You know it’s funny, after I finished Chronin I had a long period where I watched very little television, rarely played games, and listened to way fewer podcasts because I didn’t have a good place in my life to slot them into — I wasn’t sitting at my computer brainlessly pushing pixels around for months and months on end. But once The Pandemic started, I found myself with way fewer demands on my schedule but…shall we say, not exactly an overflowing bounty of energy for my professional work. So I ended up filling that bonus time with media for the first time in ages, and much of it was media I’d had recommended to me ages ago. I’ve been playing catchup on The Good Shit.
Some highlights have been: the Witcher TV show and about half the third game, Schitt’s Creek, Sense8, Pose, Derry Girls, Animal Crossing, the Hades game, the Magnus Archives, the latest arc of The Adventure Zone, Fantasy High, Chihayafuru, the Hikaru no Go CDrama…and that’s just fiction. Nonfiction podcasts I’ve really really appreciated this year are You’re Wrong About, Criminal, Reply All, The Allusionist, Maintenance Phase, Radiolab, This American Life, Every Little Thing, Science Vs, 99% Invisible, Fresh Air. I fell very hard down a few YouTube black holes, but in particular I’ve enjoyed Lindsay Ellis, Contrapoints, Princess Weekes, Sideways, LadyKnightTheBrave….and god, listen, let’s say there were a few weeks in there where I watched many many hours of Baumgartner Restoration.
Also not to be insufferable, but I’m really into all the books I’m working on right now! Both as an editor, and my original work. It’s nice to feel this excited about the things on my plate!
Yeah! YEAH!!
Anything else you’d like to mention? Upcoming projects, people you’d like to shout out, things I really should have asked but didn’t think to…?
If you like gay time travel comics, deffo go check out Chronin –– it’s only two volumes, and it’s a lot of fun! If you wanna learn about the many logistical challenges and possible future of human spaceflight, you’d probably love The Mars Challenge, which was fantastically illustrated by the excellent Wyeth Yates!
I’m also gonna don my Insufferably Proud Uncle Editor hat get up on my soapbox and yell that right this second you can go and preorder Bubble (Jordan Morris, Sarah Morgan, Tony Cliff, Natalie Riess) and The Adventure Zone: Crystal Kingdom (Clint & Griffin & Travis & Justin McElroy, Carey Pietsch), which both debut on July 13th and are both extremely fun and cool! (Although I also want to stress, they are both very much for grownups).
Thank you SO much for your time!! Happy birthday!!! And thank you for hanging out with me and this cute cactus.
