Interview with Joel Priddy 11/24/08
For his famous work “The Amazing Life of Onion Jack” from The Best American Comics 2006
A little note to our readers: ”It’s been what almost 4 years, since the interview. Both me and My partner in crime Jen have been busy or distracted, to give a proper thank you to this amazing artist. With his kind interview we where able to get in “A” for our paper. Yet it took me this long to show any gratitude. I am ashamed. Here it goes: THANK YOU JOEL PRIDDY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS. ONION JACK PUT A SMILE ON OUR FACES when all the other indie comics just made us want to shoot ourselves in the head with pennies.”
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1) No matter how many times we looked on websites we didn’t find much of your personal background. Would you care to share what inspired you to go into comic books and how you got involved with super heroes?
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Wow. When my first graphic novel was published in 2002, I did a bunch of interviews, but they Google doesn’t seem to be offering them up. Why is it only the embarrassing stuff that stays online forever?
In a nutshell: I didn’t grow up reading many comics, but I loved to draw and write stories, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I should be an artist or a writer when I grew up. It wasn’t until I was about 13 that it occurred to me that comics would allow me to do both. As a pubescent boy, I loved the power fantasies of superhero comics, but by the time I was 16 I’d delved into the darker corners of the local comics shop, and discovered things like Love and Rockets, and Will Eisner’s The Spirit. From then on, I thought of myself as a student of the medium, and didn’t have much use for superheroes. I felt like Alan Moore had written the last word on them, and the genre was just an albatross holding the comics medium down.
I still pretty much felt this way when I wrote Onion Jack. Oddly, I’ve had a resurgent love affair with superhero comics in the two or three years since then. Perhaps that’s because I’m living in a city that doesn’t have much in the way of comics shops, and superhero fare is all I can find. Or maybe I’m just at a point in my life where I need to indulge a sweet tooth for dumb fun once in a while.
I still pretty much felt this way when I wrote Onion Jack. Oddly, I’ve had a resurgent love affair with superhero comics in the two or three years since then. Perhaps that’s because I’m living in a city that doesn’t have much in the way of comics shops, and superhero fare is all I can find. Or maybe I’m just at a point in my life where I need to indulge a sweet tooth for dumb fun once in a while.
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2) Is there a reason why you titled your comic Onion Jack?
I came up with the name Onion Jack while doodling my way through a faculty meeting a few years earlier. I liked the name, and for some reason latched on to it when it came time to draw a stick figure story about superheroes. The name worked well, because the stick figure characters obviously needed to very visually distinct, while remaining very simple. And a big onion-head worked pretty well in that regard.
But, now that you have me thinking of it, back in the 80’s, there was an old Ted McKeever comic—I don’t remember which one, Metropol, maybe?—that had a throwaway character named “Vinegar Jack.” And when I read than name, I felt instant jealousy that I hadn’t come up with it myself. What beautiful folkloric poetry is in that name! So, Onion Jack is pretty much me ripping off Ted McKeever twenty years later.
But, now that you have me thinking of it, back in the 80’s, there was an old Ted McKeever comic—I don’t remember which one, Metropol, maybe?—that had a throwaway character named “Vinegar Jack.” And when I read than name, I felt instant jealousy that I hadn’t come up with it myself. What beautiful folkloric poetry is in that name! So, Onion Jack is pretty much me ripping off Ted McKeever twenty years later.
3) We have been paying attention to the dates, and do the dates show accurate correlation as to realistic stuff? For example when the onion jack first appeared in 1915-1916 like superman is it the same year that superman fell to earth. We checked the history of Superman and the first issue came out in 1938, and there was no specific year to identify what year he was born. So we are wondering if 1915-1916 have any significance with super-heroes timeline?
Well, an important fact about the Onion Jack story is that I spent about 10 hours on it, total. So there wasn’t much time to do things like, oh, say, research. It was my intention that the events in Jack’s life parallel the history of superhero comics. So, he’d debut around the time Superman and his many imitators did, which meant that he’d have to be born twentysome years earlier. I think. I may have had some other, more specific ideas in mind at the time, but I’m not dredging them up right now.
4) In 1938 year of Onion Jack he is referring to the guy in Boston that could fly? Who is the guy, once again we checked superman information but we are unsure if he worked in Boston at one point. (A Little sidetone, we do not read super-hero comics so we do not know many facts.)
The flying guy was meant to be a reference to Superman, or at least to my Superman analogue, The Mighty Wedge. Boston was some sort of play on the concept of Metropolis, the details of which are a little fuzzy to me, now. It always bugged me that Metropolis and Gotham were bothsupposed to be New York. That seems untidy. So, I think I decided to move them both elsewhere: Metropolis became Boston, and Gotham became Chicago. There’s no way the reader could know any of this of course, but that’s kind of how I write: I have a bunch of ideas that I forget to ever mention. Sometimes that gives the story a nice sense of background texture. Other times it just makes everything ambiguous and weird.
5) Does Onion Jack reflect your personal opinion on super-hero comics in relationship to history? Why did you choose to tell such a story is there a hidden meaning behind it?
My idea at the time was that superhero comics had reached their pinnacle of cultural relevancy back in WWII, and had been coasting downhill ever since. I considered it a dead-end genre, and since I wasn’t interested in ever telling another superhero story, I decided to cram every thought I’d ever had about superheroes into these ten pages. As I mentioned above, my attitude towards superhero stories has changed since then. I now think there’s still meat on those bones, and will probably end up doing something involving people in tights sooner or later.
So the idea was Jack’s biography as illumination of the superhero genre’s history. I didn’t think of it as a hidden meaning (Jack pretty much spells it out on the page where he’s sitting on a park bench). But, much like the tendency I mentioned earlier about having a bunch of ideas and them forgetting them, I don’t think it’s always wise or interesting to be explicit with the ideas behind a story. If you spell it out, the piece becomes didactic. And that’s no fun. These ideas provide structure and direction, which makes a story more satisfying, but shouldn’t get in the way of the storytelling itself.
