December 3, 2024Interview with creator Nic Sweet
[some minor editing done for clarity]
BIOGRAPHICAL INFO
Boom Town Press: What inspired you to get into graphic novel making or cartoon making?
Nic Sweet: I think the first comic book I remember was Spectacular Spider-Man. He was fighting the Tarantula, I think, like the first comic book I remember checking out, right? So, four or five years old, it was that early that I remember wanting to make comics. And I’ve done lots of detours and filmmaking and movie making and working in television, but it’s something I’ve always come back to.
BTP: Cool. All right, can you describe your artistic style? And the second part of that is what influences have shaped it?
NS: So I would say currently, artists like Sergio Toppi, he’s an Italian comics guy, Frans Masereel is a Belgian printmaker, Mike Mignola got me into looking up all these other artists. Like, I was like, what? What’s influencing him? Digging into other, you know, old expressionist stuff, and Sergio Aragonés is another big one. So grew the wanderer, which is just stupid funny comics. I love it, you know.
BTP: Your specific artistic style?
NC: Yeah, so I think that that’s informed by doing my 30,000 drawings. I’m prolific, I make a lot of stuff, and I study and I dig. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was small. So I get into a topic or a keyword, and I will just keep digging and trying to find out more.
BTP: Describe what kind of tools you use to make artwork?
NC: So I’m a generalist in that I use for visual like, printmaking is a big thing for me, like, I’ll go to block print and I’ve used traditional materials – fountain pens, ink for the current project. I make my sketches with pencil, I scan in these really dumb drawings into and then go into procreate. I use procreate. I abandoned Adobe because of their bad AI policy stuff. Procreate does everything I need it to.
BTP: What were some of your earliest tools that you used back in the day when you were, like, just starting out. So, like when you’re five or six years old?
NS: Well, okay, so I had one advantage – my grandmother was an artist. Whenever I visited her, she always had new stuff for us to try out. It could be plastic ink, clay, it could be let’s go work in the wood shop. It could be lots of different things; pen and ink and graphite. Just drawing with pencil was a kind of comfort place for a long time, especially when I was younger. But anything that anybody would give me, they give me any kind of supplies, and I would just, I would just want to, I would want to play.
BTP: Were you a doodler, like in when you’re in school?
NS: Yeah, I drew through math and science, I could listen and pass tests, but in terms of homework, I was horrible, and I would be in the back of the class with the sketchbook, or lined paper and drawing on it. I was at a Catholic school for a while, and I remember drawing little stick figures jumping off of the paragraphs to their doom or whatever.
BTP: Did you get in trouble for that stuff?
NS: I got kicked out eventually, but not for drawing.
THE MAKING OF SOLARPUNK RANGER
BTP: Gotcha. Gotcha, all right. How do you approach character design? How would you describe your main character in Solarpunk Ranger? How did you come up with this character?
NS: So this is part of a world that I’ve been trying to work on for, I don’t know, eight or nine years, and I’ve just been chipping at little parts of it. And I think that creating characters. Some of it comes from me, some of it comes from just observing the world and living life, and specifically with solar punk Ranger, the world is a solar punk fantasy thing, and the character is a ranger in both senses of that word. So in a fantasy sense, like Dungeons and Dragons, he could fit there, but he’s also very much a cowboy. So it’s like a double entendre on that kind of stuff. I do not fantasize about hellscapes. I fantasize about adventure. I fantasize about what if the current situation in the world was flipped, where these giant state controlled or corporate controlled things were the minimal element, and then everywhere else in the world was more decentralized and people had more freedom. That’s what I fantasize about, right people using tech to do things that are positive, rather than, I don’t know, put a million people out of work or whatever, right?
BTP: Or blow people up. Your work has a political edge to it, how has anarchist theory and philosophy entered into your art, or impacted it?
When I’m making pictures, everything in my life is going to bleed into it.
NS: When I’m making pictures, everything in my life is going to bleed into it. I got involved in television production on a public access thing called Anchorage Underground. I was on that for 30 episodes…
People helped each other with bills. Fed each other. Mutual Aid was something I saw lived before I ever read about it. The first book I picked up that was explicitly anarchist was an autobiography of Voltarine De Clerye. I was working at a film archive and would bug out on my lunches to peruse the UAA Consortium Library. I also remember reading alot of Lewis Mumford until a co-worker suggested Jacuqes Ellul. So Christian Anarchist ideas and Individualist Anarchist ideas were the first times I was reading about it.
(Nic’s longer answer to this question is available at: Anarchism & Art)
BTP: So we talked about character development, this was a long time coming to kind of piece the story together. What was your process for developing the visual narrative, how did you choose?
NS: So this is one chunk of this character’s life, I’ve constructed an origin story, and done the script.
BTP: Oh, so this is the second part.
NS: Well, I mean, this is where the story starts. I like to go forward, I don’t like prequels. But yeah, so I had all of this stuff. I had this story, I had this character, and I was like, man these guys that make manga, they do like an episode in a week. Like what? How does that work, and I work a full time job. So I was like, all right give me two weeks and see what I can do. I gave myself really, like, it has to be done in such an amount of time. And that forced a lot of creative decisions. It’s looser than other things that I’ve worked on, but I think the narrative and the storytelling is still there.
ON CREATIVITY
BTP: Do you have any rituals or routines that help you get into the creative mindset? Like, for example, I saw the character go into the dream dimension and then it was really wild art. Is that actually autobiography, that part? How do you access this creativity?
NS: I don’t have specific rituals, I have a lot of training. I mean art school did it, there’s aspects of art school that did it for me. I had been drawing up to that point, but then I had access to figure drawing five or six days a week and I got into a habit of just always doing stuff all day, like a job. I don’t have block. If I have two days where I’m not drawing or I’m not working on stuff, I’m probably sick or something really bad is happening.
BTP: What part of any one of the stories you created was your best part that you thought went perfectly?
NS: I think the thing that I like about it is balancing out the highfalutin ideas and stupid humor. There’s got to be a level of chuckles to get you through the existential stuff. So I think that is the part of it that I was happy about, in retrospect.
BTP: So the environmental theme is that part of being from Alaska or from Rochester? Where did this theme that’s important to you come from?
NS: Sure, nature is synonymous with God for me but nature I don’t necessarily ascribe a specific positive or negative. Nature has an indifference, and at the same time, the Kropotkin lesson – there are examples of mutual aid in nature or cooperation in nature as much, if not more than the competition piece.
BTP: Yeah, I did notice that that’s right towards the end. I feel like people either choose sides in that, they think nature is either hyper competitive or communal.
NS: People will give you a Darwinian model or something. But even then, it’s not necessarily Darwin’s model, it’s a capitalist version of a Darwin model or something. The classic goof with the Darwin thing is only the strongest will survive. And that’s not what he said. He said those who are fit to survive will, well that’s a little different. I’m not necessarily a Darwinist, but…
BTP: You are definitely witnessing more of what actually happens in Nature. What are some of your collaborations?
NS: I’ve submitted stuff to distros that’s been reprinted in zines, but I think that’s about it.
BTP: Okay. Can you say what that is, what is a distro?
NS: A distro is a distribution center for zines.
BTP: And just for the people who are born after 2000 what are zines in like two sentences?
NS: So a zine is a do it yourself, magazine or comic book. And the topics for those things could be anything from quantum physics, how to build a car, to storytelling to politics. I’ve got one on my desk here that’s about a trans man that, or a you know, woman that lived as a man in North Africa and was a soldier. There’s loads of different topics available.
BTP: I like this, like the juxtaposition of Ranger, which is this kind of old western, but then you thrust them into the future. So it’s kind of cool this hybrid mixing of things that don’t necessarily go together.
NS: Old school rednecks were Blair Mountain, all those old school rednecks wore red sashes around their necks. They weren’t David Duke’s people.
BTP: Are there specific genres you prefer to work within, or how do they influence your storytelling? What genre are you consuming the most of?
NS: Adventure and adventure fantasy. When I think about fantasy or science fiction, or science fantasy, or any of those kinds of things, the thing that attracts me is when they’re using fantasy to deconstruct an idea. I watched One Piece with my kids and I think that gives a great kind of caricature and satire on things that we live with. One piece is a pirate anime. I slept on it for years, but it was 2022 when COVID happened and I started to dig into it. And I was like, oh, wait a minute, what is this?
BTP: Okay, wait a second, it’s now on Netflix, though, it’s a live action thing and they’re gonna destroy it. You think they’re just gonna make it bad?
NS: It’s not as bad as the Cowboy Bebop thing, but I’m enjoying what they’re doing with it in the other place. I watch a new episode on Sunday with my daughter. It’s great. I actually have the flag up in my office.
BTP: Who are some of your mentors or artists who inspired you?
NS: So I named comics guys. I had this period of time where I didn’t think I was going to do comic book stuff. So I was doing a lot of live action production and studying that. My mentors were in California for a while when I went to art school. That was CalArts, and I had some incredible mentors there; Mike Mitchell, Corny Cole, John Mahoney. They’re Disney guys, Warner Brothers, you know, working for those guys and those places it wasn’t just about the commercial side of it but what are the possibilities with the artistic piece too.
BTP: How do you balance your artistic career with your personal life and teaching, you’re teaching now right?
NS: Teaching has been the compromise to have artistic freedom and COVID has has made our family’s life a roller coaster. Since then we’ve been back and forth between Alaska and New York and trying to keep food on the table and keep the lights on, all that stuff. So that part has been I think the most difficult, especially the last couple years here and the COVID year too, being a part for however many months out of the year.
FUTURE PROJECTS
BTP: Because your family’s here in Rochester, wow yeah. What can readers look forward to? What are your projects that you’re currently working on?
NS: I have one more that’s a similar format to this. I have a script and I have some pages done, but I haven’t dug into it. I have a whole world that is called Nemos and that’s the project indefinitely, I’m just gonna keep working on that. I don’t know if it’ll ever get picked up or anything like that. But having ADHD, and if I have projects, it helps me to cope with a lot of the other stuff. If I don’t, if I don’t have a project that I’m working on and, you know, idle hands, right?
BTP: So as a follow up, you said that you end up digging and digging into certain topics, is that part of ADHD? There’s almost a benefit from it, in a way, if it’s controlled, right? Because you’re going to go down maybe a rabbit hole, but then that gets you some type of deeper level of learning.
NS: Right? So like the Solar Punk stuff, I have a style sheet somewhere of all the different things that I’ve dug into. One example I was looking into is mycelium – they’re using mushrooms to make building materials. They’re reinvigorating transport with airships as a lower energy way to transport big weight. It’s like making a sailboat out of a tanker. There’s lots of interesting things, so I am looking for the good news. We see the doom and destruction, 90% of the time on our feed, yeah, but you gotta dig for the good stuff.
BTP: I hear you, especially with the internet you can know everything bad that’s happening everywhere in the world all the time.. So it’s not easy to filter that out.
NS: And I’m not saying to run from a fight. I mean, like things that I don’t agree with, if push comes to shove, I definitely fight about it, but like….
BTP: Yep, cool. Well, this has been an awesome convo. We really appreciate your time and your art. Where can people catch up with your work or reach out to you?
