Richard: What is your involvement with the Comics Reporter and Comics Journal?

Andrew: I've done interviews for both dating back about five years, including conversations with Kyle Baker, Greg Rucka, Mark Tatulli, Keith Knight, Jason Thompson, Derek Kirk Kim, Jason Shiga, Lark Pien, Ben Catmull, and filmmaker Steven-Charles Jaffe. I've got a list of about a dozen more comics and animation-related interviews that I'd like to do within the next couple of years, but my day job keeps me really busy (which is why I'm working on this interview around midnight).

Richard: What are your duties as Cartoon Art Museum Curator/Gallery Manager?

Andrew: The short answer is that I put together all of the Cartoon Art Museum's exhibitions. In some cases, other people select the artwork, and my main responsibility is designing and installing each exhibition. Usually, though, I start with an exhibition concept (either proposed by me, or someone from our board of directors, or an artist, or an art collector), then set about tracking down artwork for that exhibition.

If I were putting together an X-Men exhibition, for example, I'd decide which eras of the comic are essential to the exhibition, and I'd start contacting art collectors and artists to find out what artwork I can actually borrow for the Cartoon Art Museum. When I get all of the artwork in my possession, I mat and frame everything and write the text that we'll post on the gallery walls, which helps put everything into context for the viewer, who may or may not be familiar with the X-Men. Along the way, I have to do all sorts of additional work, like writing a press release about the exhibition, lining up special events, book signings and planning an opening reception. I also handle interviews, give guided tours of exhibitions, and handle any number of exhibition-related jobs that come up along the way.

We host about a dozen major new exhibitions each year, so I'm generally working on at least five or six shows at a time, while laying the groundwork for exhibitions that the public won't see for another two or three years.

Richard: What benefits can people get from the Cartoon Art Museum?

Andrew: I'm biased, but I like to think that the Cartoon Art Museum offers something for everyone who visits. Younger children can see some of their favorite cartoon characters in our animation gallery, older kids can see what's going on in the contemporary art scene, and older visitors can take a look back at some of the comic strips that they grew up with. It's a great place to discover new favorites or catch up with an old friend.

Artists (both aspiring and professional) benefit from the Museum in a lot of ways. We offer an array of cartooning classes for kids and adults, and we host dozens of events every year that allow the general public to meet and interact with professional cartoonists. Within the past few months, we've been visited by syndicated cartoonists Keith Knight, Dan Piraro and Hilary Price; comic book artists Dan Brereton, Gene Colan, Al Gordon, James Jean, Steve Leialoha and Joe Rubinstein; and animators Enrico Casarosa, Ronnie Del Carmen, Eric Goldberg, Jeff Pidgeon, and Dice Tsutsumi. You just can't get that kind of regular access to artists at any other kind of major art museum.

Richard: How is the Museum funded?

Andrew: The majority of the Museum's funding comes from various community and arts-based grants. The rest of our operating budget is made up from individual contributions, plus revenue from admissions, book signings, and other fundraising events. Bringing in enough money to meet our expenses is especially difficult with the current economy, but our staff and board of directors have kept things running for nearly 25 years at this point. People reading this interview who'd like to help out can visit our website (http://cartoonart.org/support.html) or e-mail me if they'd like to offer financial support for the Museum.

Richard: Who is Shaenon Garrity?

Andrew: Shaenon is the lovely and talented creator of many popular web comics, including Narbonic (http://www.narbonic.com) and Skin Horse (http://www.skin-horse.com), and she's been my wife for almost five years. I could go on for several paragraphs about everything she does, but I should probably just direct

everyone to her main website, http://www.shaenon.com , and save myself a lot of time.

Richard: How did you end up writing for Marvel Comics?

Andrew: The interesting thing about the comics industry is that you can never tell where people are going to end up one, five, or ten years down the road. In early 2002, Joey Manley launched a web comics collective called Modern Tales, and Shaenon was one of the first cartoonists that he recruited. That summer, at the San Diego Comic-Con, Shaenon and I met many of the other artists who were part of Modern Tales, including many people who remain close friends today. One of the artists that we met that year was John Barber, whose web comic, Vicious Souvenirs, really stood out as a cool piece of experimental cartooning, something that really played around with the possibilities of the online format.

Three years later, John was an editor at Marvel. He had a project that he thought would be a good fit for Shaenon, called her up to see if she wanted to try writing something, and she invited me to help out. We've done three Marvel Holiday Specials and a weird little side project for Tyson Chicken that only saw print in a magazine called Food Service Directors Monthly...but it's all been fun.

Richard: What story did you write in the "Marvel Holiday Special 2007 # 1"?

Andrew: Shaenon and I wrote a story that was illustrated by Lou Kang, called "Piece of Cake." Our instructions were to write a holiday team-up story featuring

Spider-Man and Wolverine, highlighting the contrast between their personalities, and it was a blast. I'm a huge Spider-Man fan, and I'm sure that I had a big, dopey smile on my face the whole time we were writing it. I made sure to squeeze Betty Brant, Joe Robertson, J. Jonah Jameson and Aunt May into the story, along with a Sentinel and probably the goofiest Doctor Octopus joke ever committed to print in an official Marvel Comic. (Which fits with the two previous specials, which had the most offensive MODOK joke ever committed to print in an all-ages book and the silliest Citizen Kane/Moleman mash-up ever committed to print.)

Richard: Would you like to write more for Marvel?

Andrew: Definitely. Shaenon and I don't have as much time for side projects as we'd like these days, but we've got a long list of artists that we'd love to work with, and hopefully we'll hit upon the right project at the right time one of these days. I've got a few killer pitches in mind featuring some of my favorite 1980s Marvel characters, but

I can't predict when I'll find the time to write them up (and when Joe Quesada will find the time to reject them. Which is a shame, since my "U.S.1" pitch would also make a great movie).

Richard: What is "The Chronicles of William Bazillion"?

Andrew: The Chronicles of William Bazillion (http://www.williambazillion.com) is a web comic that I launched a little over two years ago, and it's about the richest kid on Earth and his adventures. I drew a lot of inspiration from Johnny Quest and Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck stories, since I wanted to do an kid-adventurer comic with a global scope.

The twist that makes this comic different from those others, however, is that William is a complete, amoral jerk, who really doesn't care about anything but getting more money and more power. He sees his fellow kid adventurers as disposable resources, and would (and probably did) sell out his own family if he thought it would help him out.

The current (and so far, only) storyline is called "The Race for Santa's Nazi Gold," and it's been unfolding over the course of two years. William and his crew have discovered a treasure map confirming that Santa Claus had made some shady dealings with Hitler, and that a massive stockpile of Nazi gold is hidden in his fortress at the North Pole.

Every adventurer on Earth is converging on the North Pole, including several hundred clones of Richard Nixon.

It's a big, crazy story, and I don't plot ahead, which means that I basically try to write myself into a corner every week, so that I'll have an interesting starting point the next week.

Richard: What is your opinion on web comics?

Andrew: It's a really interesting branch of comics, in that just about anyone with regular access to a computer can start up a comic and distribute it worldwide within minutes of launching it. There are no particular rules, no particular restrictions, and no particular editors, and that has allowed people to produce some really amazing works in ways that really wouldn't have been possible just a decade ago. I don't have time to read as many as I'd like, but there are a lot of great comics being produced online right now, and the best ones now are as entertaining as comics that are produced solely for print. The distinction between the two is beginning to blur quite a bit these days, as more "print" people and publishers are experimenting with online content and more "web" people are hooking up with publishers and aggressively seeking print deals.

Richard: What comics did you read as a child and do you read now?

Andrew: Peanuts is the first comic that I remember reading, and it's still one of my favorites today. I buy every new collected edition from Fantagraphics as soon as it's available. They've just started into the 1970s, which is 20 years after the strip started, and Schulz was still finding new things to do with his characters.

The comics that got me started me down my career path are Marvel's G.I. Joe and Transformers. Those were my "gateway" books, since those led me to Spider-Man (I had to find out why he was wearing a black costume all of a sudden), which led me to other Marvel superhero books, which kept me reading comics long enough to get caught up in the "Bat-Mania" resurgence in 1989, which led to me reading Frank Miller's Batman comics, which led me to the rest of the DC Universe, and so on.

Nowadays, I read a lot of comics for work, but I still read a fair amount just for fun, and when I'm really lucky, the two overlap. One of the next shows on my agenda is a big Stan Sakai retrospective, so I'm reading through a big pile of Usagi Yojimbo trades to brush up on my samurai rabbit knowledge. Each exhibition that I put together gives me an opportunity to learn or re-learn about a particular comic or artist, and you can usually see me on the subway with a big pile of comics that I'm using for research.

Richard: How can someone contact you?

Andrew: My Cartoon Art Museum e-mail address is gallery@cartoonart.org; my e-mail for freelance writing, cartooning and general correspondence is andrewfarago@hotmail.com ; my blog is andrewfarago.livejournal.com ; and I've got a Facebook page, too, so I'm not hard to track down.

Richard: What words do you have for comic book fans?

Andrew: Hmm... Apart from advising them to read my comics and to support the Cartoon Art Museum (which are the two pieces of free advice that I give to anyone who'll listen), I'd recommend developing at least one or two interests that have nothing whatsoever to do with comics. Find a sport that you enjoy watching (or, better yet, playing), read classic literature or some good non-fiction, volunteer at whatever local non-profit can best use your services... it's a great big world out there, and life's too short to spend more than 15 minutes of it arguing with people about The Spirit movie or the next Green Lantern crossover event.