Action Philosophy 101

Class is back in session this week, and writer Fred Van Lente lets us peek at the syllabus

 

In the world of philosophy comics, writer Fred Van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey are giants, towering above all of the other creators working in the genre. In fact, it's probably safe to say that their Action Philosophers series is the single best philosophy comic book on the shelves today.

 

Okay, so it's a small field they're working in, but the lack of competition doesn't make their series any less hilarious and even (and I feel silly saying this about any comic that doesn’t take itself seriously) brilliant.

 

In each of the five previous issues, the pair has taken a trio of philosophers or schools of thought and organized them around themes, like #5's "Hate the French," which covered Descartes, Sarte and Derrida, or #2's "All-Sex Special," which included a Thomas Jefferson story entitled "I was the President's sex slave!"

 

The approach has been highly comic (this is one comic book that is actually, literally a comic book) to the point of high parody, but at the same time seriously informative. Think of it as Sesame Street for a college student audience.

 

This week's #6 is the "People's Choice" issue, featuring three of the most often requested Action Philosophers, St. Thomas Aquinas, Soren Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstien.

 

If a comic book with Wittgenstien on the cover seems like a head-scratcher to you, then you're a bit of a latecomer to the AP! bandwagon. The first few issues of the series sold-out quickly, and the pair recently collected the first few issues in their "Action Philosophers Giant-Size Thing" to help meet demand, with a second collection to follow.

 

As popular as the book has proven thus far, Van Lente and Dunlavey are actually in the process of winding it down, with #9 slated to be the final issue.

 

So with the third-to-last issue on the shelves, we checked in with Van Lente to see what he has planned post-AP, how much research goes into the series and just how zany is too zany.

 

Bam!Kapow!: I take it you've always been somewhat interested in philosophy? What kind of background do you have with the subject? Did you, like, major in it in college, or have you been a teacher before?

 

Fred Van Lente: I taught freshmen writing for one year at the University of Pittsburgh, where I was studying for an MA in English Literature, which is what I got my BA in. This being the early 1990s, it was impossible not to be involved in lit crit and not get inundated with Derrida, Freud, Karl Marx, Adorno, all those guys.

 

I became a minor legend, at least among my own students, for doing "Freud in 40", which was a lecture that ran through all of Sigmund Freud in one class period, to prepare them for some B.S. essay the boiler-plate syllabus had them write. I did the same for Marx and Saussere, the founder of semiotics.

 

I really intensely disliked Academia, and was not a huge fan of teaching, so I dropped out of grad school after only one year, but Action Philosophers would seem to be a logical extension of those lectures… Only with more sex jokes! (laughs)

 

BK!: Despite the stories being so full of jokes, I've always been really struck by how damn informative these stories are. In terms of informing readers of the philosophers' bios and philosophies, each story is remarkably well done. Can you tell us a little bit about how the creative process works? How much research goes into the stories and so forth?

 

Van Lente: Several weeks to a month's worth of research goes into each individual story. I try to read, cover to cover, at least one full work by each featured philosopher, and more often than not I read a lot of biographical material as well. This being a comic book, a lot of effort goes into tracking down photo reference on-line (God bless Google Images).

 

When I can't find something, I'm always amazed at Super Artist Ryan Dunlavey's ability to track down the obscurest photo reference—do you know how hard it is to locate an image of a 19th century vaginal enema (for "Freud")? Kids, don't try this at home.

 

BK!: Has writing this particular comic been much more labor intensive than some of the other comics you've written?

 

Van Lente: Sort of. In the sense of all the reading yes, but on the other hand, since it's condensing other people's ideas—and making fun of them—it's a lot more relaxing. It's always much harder and more stressful (because it reflects more directly on you) to come up with your own ideas, but it's that side of it—writing for Marvel and others—that pays my bills, so no complaints here.

 

BK!: Is it difficult to strike a balance between how funny and how serious each story is? Do you find yourself going back to drafts and thinking, "Hmm, this is so dry, it really more sight gags" or "Wow, this is a little too zany, better scale back"?

 

Van Lente: You make it sound like there's some kind of logic to the pacing!(laughs) If we think of a joke, we stick it in! Ryan and I both grew up loving MAD, so that's the influence there. The only reason I cut is for length or because there's a better way to make a philosophical point… never because it's too zany.

 

BK!: The early issues of the series all sold out. Were you caught off guard at all by the series' success, or did you guys go into it thinking, "Yep, we've got ourselves a winner here."

 

Van Lente: I woke up one morning and thought "Philosophy Comics!" and dollar signs went off in my eyes! (laughs) No… I thought we were going to crash and burn, honestly. I thought, since we had won the Xeric Grant, we would at least manage to pound out a couple issues and then use that material to interest a book publisher in the project. But our #1 numbers were double what I thought they were going to be—nothing to impress anyone else, but, hey, for a black and white philosophy comic from a company nobody heard of before it was pretty impressive. (Just to give you some perspective: We're still here. Claypool isn't.)

 

Our numbers kept going up until now, around #5 to #6 they've started to level off, but the fan mail and enthusiasm we get from readers and retailers alike has been just mind-blowing.

 

In general, I find I should just shut up and keep writing, because every time I think I know what will or won't be commercial I find I'm totally wrong…

 

BK!: This week's issue is the "People's Choice," the most requested philosophers to get the Action Philosophers' treatment. When you were collecting suggestions and votes for it, did you get any that really threw you?

 

Van Lente: Oh yeah, like every week—still! (laughs) Somebody writes in recommending someone who I guess turned them on in college but Ryan and I have never heard of before, usually obscure lefties. People have also suggested we do an All-Vegetarian Issue and an All-Feminism Issue, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

 

The one name that keeps coming up is the Marquis de Sade … Jesus, I'm like, people, people: Wanting to fuck everything that moves is NOT a philosophy!

 

It's an important life goal.

 

BK!: Was "The People's Choice" theme really just an underhanded attempt to get readers to do some of your work for you, by having them come up with future Action Philosophers?

 

Van Lente: It seemed pretty overhanded to me! (laughs)

 

BK!: What are the "themes" for #7 and #8?

 

Van Lente: Action Philosophers #7, which premieres at this year's Small Press Expo in October, is sub-titled "It's All Greek To You," and features the Pre-Socractics, Aristotle and Epictetus the Stoic. AP #8 will premiere at the second New York Comic Con in February and is the "Senseless Violence Special", which roughs up Kant, Hegel and John Stuart Mill.

 

What do those thinkers have to do with violence, you may ask?

 

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

 

That's why it's senseless. (Ba-dump-bump!)

 

BK!: How did your Giant-Size Thing sell?

 

Van Lente: Again, I was skeptical since it only reprinted the first three issues and not the whole series, but we blew through the first printing in under a month, and now we're well into our second.

 

So, what have we learned from this interview? As a businessman, Fred sucks.

 

Also, since it's clear lots of people are buying AP only in trade form, in December ships Action Philosophers Giant-Size Thing vol. 2, which will reprint AP#4-6.

 

BK!: You do realize how "Giant-Size Thing" sounds in certain contexts, don't you?

 

Van Lente: Yeah, but I've been hearing it my whole life, so you get used to it after a while…

 

Wait. No. That was a lie.

 

BK!: Issue #9 is a "Lightning Round" issue, where you're going to try and get 20 philosophers into a single issue? This is to be your last issue, and the idea's to cover as many philosophers as possible before bowing out?

 

Van Lente: Yeah. Although we're coming out with the 100-page "Giant Size Things" right now to meet demand, around 2008 we will collect the whole series into one enormous package (another phrase I hear a lot), with all the philosophers in chronological order, to make, with apologies to Larry Gonick, sort of a Cartoon Guide to Philosophy. This way, we'll have all the gaps filled in with smaller stories.

 

BK!: So, why are you guys calling it quits?

 

Van Lente: Actually, we were only going to do five issues, then reader demand stretched it to eight. Now nine. Part of it is because the history of philosophy is a finite thing. We will have largely covered that history once #8 is done, with the stragglers coming in the final, ninth issue. Unless we decided to pad out the series with, y'know, lesser thinkers like the Marquis de Sade and some of the other benchwarmers people have been asking after, but we don't want to do that.

 

Also, when we're done, it'll be 288 pages of philosophy comics! That's a lot! We have multiple interests, so we'll move on to new things that will be just as entertaining and edifying, I promise.

 

BK!: Through cons and letters and emails, have you gotten a pretty good sense of who your audience is, exactly?

 

Van Lente: Freaks!

 

I mean that in a good way.

 

BK!: Do you have, say, more philosophy students or professors reading you then, say, She-Hulk or Firestorm?

 

Van Lente: Well, I will ask my good bud and former roommate Jamal Igle, penciler of Firestorm, how many letters he gets from philosophy students, but I hope Jay won't be too offended if I go out on a limb here and say probably, yes.

 

Actually, we do get a lot of mail from people who've never read comics before but are into philosophy, who have had their comics-reading friends shove copies of AP into their hands, and now they're converts. We're just doing our part to spread the glory that is graphic literature—the non-sucky kind, that is.

 

BK!: Have you ever gotten any kind of serious flak for your depictions of some of the more controversial figures, like maybe Bodhidharma or Ayn Rand or any of the Christian thinkers?

 

Van Lente: Pretty much continuously. I'm not religious myself, but what I find fascinating is that religious people tend to blow a gasket whenever anyone presents a version of their belief system that does not match almost identically with their own… At least the religious people who read our comic seem to. It's kind of like, have you seen the covers? Were you expecting catechism? (laughs)

 

BK!: Do you have plans to work on any thing with Ryan Dunlavey after AP! wraps?

 

Van Lente: That bastard? Hell, no. I'm changing my phone number…

 

Actually, we've got a couple ideas we're kicking around:

 

–OFFICE SAMURAI is a fiction OGN that remakes Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" in an American office setting, with a temp instead of a masterless samurai, who pits two evil departments of the same corporation against each other. That's based on a screenplay I wrote that Ryan would adapt.

 

–COMIC BOOK COMICS would be the only history of comic and cartoon art that IS a comic book, and would settle such burning questions as: Who really created the Marvel Universe, Lee or Kirby? How much did American comics influence manga? And the newspaper funnies: Who cares anymore, really?

 

–And MEGA-MYTHOLOGY retells the world's greatest myths and legends in the irreverent gut-and-brain-busting Action Philosophers style.

 

I think we'll end up doing all of these eventually. As to which one we'll do first, that's the unanswered question… We'll be doing AP at least until spring '07, so we have some time to make up our minds.

 

BK!: Can you see yourself revisiting the AP! concept with Dunlavey down the road at some point? Or are there any Action Philosophers you could see spinning-off into their own comics or series in the future?

 

Van Lente: Yeah, right. I can see it now: NIETZSCHE: ORIGINAL UBERMENSCH, in which Mr. Nihlist assassinates various dieties for a living, proclaiming each time, "God is Dead."

 

(beat - stares off into space)

 

Hey, uh, sorry, Caleb, I got to cut this interview short… I gotta go jot some things down…

 

 

For more on Van Lente, click to fredvanlente.com. For more on Action Philosophers, click to eviltwincomics.com