An Interview with John Porcellino
It is our great pleasure to have the opportunity to interview John Porcellino, the author of King-Cat, which is one of the longest-running minicomics zines out there. Photocopied, folded, stapled, and mailed, each issue of King-Cat mixes Zen koans and stories with observations, memories, top 40 lists, and letters. Porcellino’s work has influenced many autobiographix creators, and below he talks with us about letting his comics be what they wanted to be, without getting in the way too much, and the joys and challenges of sustaining a long-running creative project.
Describe your comics journey—how did you get into making comics?
I was a kid who was always writing and drawing and making little handmade books out of my writing and drawing…so it was only natural that I gravitated toward making comics, especially self-published ones. I wasn’t a person who really read comic books as a kid—I had a handful, maybe six or seven total, that I bought on the newsstands at the train station, mostly supernatural thriller-type comics. But I loved reading, so I would devour the Sun-Times that my dad brought home with him every day, and of course I loved the comic strips. So my early comics education came from things like Ziggy, Miss Peach, and Boner’s Ark (which was in the Tribune, the paper my grandma got, and I would read each weekend).
How did you develop your voice/unique comics style?
I just drew—the usual kids’ kind of comics—an oval with a couple dots for a head and a line for a mouth, and kept going. My mature style is really just a refinement of that. When I was a teenager I discovered the comics Ernie Pook by Lynda Barry and Life in Hell by Matt Groening, and to put it in simple terms, I think my comics ended up being a kind of mutant distillation of those two strips…the kind of open-eyed, direct literary style of Lynda’s writing, coupled with the pared down, fine line drawing style of Matt. Other than that, I always just tried to let my comics be what they wanted to be without too much fuss on my end. I kind of let them go whatever direction they wanted to go, and followed. So as far as development, it was really just continually making comics over time, and letting them develop naturally the way they wanted to develop, and kind of getting out of the way.
What are some of the joys and challenges of creating and distributing a long-running comics zine?
The greatest joy has been the way a community of readers has grown up around the zine. That means so much to me. My whole goal with making art has always been to just communicate as directly with people, with as few barriers between artist and reader as possible, and there’s now a whole generation or two who have grown up alongside King-Cat, who have followed it for decades, and that’s really incredible to me. It’s like a family, sort of.
The challenges are just that the bigger something gets, it gets to where the things that came easy before become something of an effort. The hardest part I think is that there’s a weird zone where something gets successful enough that it requires a ton of effort to sustain, but at the same time, the financial support needed to sustain it isn’t really there yet. I think that’s where a lot of creative projects break down, unfortunately. It can be years of hardship and sacrifice to keep the thing your priority before it kind of gets over the hump and becomes self-sustaining. I feel grateful that I was able to navigate that, whether it was by perseverance, dumb luck, or just a willingness to sacrifice a normal life in deference to the art. It was hard for a long time.
Are you working on something now?
I’m always working on something! Either working on King-Cat, making little notes, working on stories, penciling, inking…and then the other stuff…commissions, filling orders, putting together book projects and stuff like that. My newest publication is called The Collected Prairie Pothole, and it collects the weekly comic strips I did for the Chicago Reader, and then kept going for my Patreon supporters online. That’s from Uncivilized Books and should be out any day now.
John Porcellino is the author of the celebrated, autobiographical comics-zine King-Cat, which he’s self-published since 1989, and two graphic novels, Thoreau at Walden (CCS/Hyperion, 2008) and The Hospital Suite (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014).
He lives in Beloit, Wisconsin with his wife Stephanie, a cat, two dogs, and thirteen squirrels.