Who is Rich?. Matthew Klam

       SIX

      In college I couldn’t figure out what to major in. Over in English they were complaining that language itself had become brittle and useless, and over in art, so-called postmodern painting was being taught in a way I didn’t understand, as the subject as object ran into ontological difficulties that couldn’t be solved with a paintbrush. I started making comics for some relief—leaning heavily on my own journals, since I’d never learned how to make up anything—an episodic, thinly veiled series of stories about a girl and boy who fall in love, stay up late, eat pizza in their undies, make charcoal drawings, create installations of dirt and lightbulbs, hate their fathers, move into an apartment together, build futon frames, flush their contact lenses down the drain, throw parties with grain alcohol punch, get knocked up, have an abortion, read Krishnamurti, graduate, break up, fuck other people, and move together to Baltimore, to an abandoned industrial space where sunlight comes through holes in the roof, dappling the walls.

      After college I published it myself, on sheets of eight and a half by eleven, folded in half and pressed flat with the back of a spoon, stapled in the middle, and handed it out personally at conventions for a dollar. Making comics kept me from going apeshit. Later, at the ad agency where I worked, I upped the production value, made the leap to offset printing, sending it through on the invoice of a client in St. Louis, who, without knowing, paid for my two-color card-stock cover. I didn’t dedicate myself to it, didn’t plan on toiling for years. I figured I’d do a few more, get a job as a creative director, drill holes in my head and use it as a bowling ball.

      One day I got a call. “We like your comic. We’d like to publish it. Would you be interested in that?” I remember walking around the office, heat boiling my face, wondering who to tell. Soon my work began appearing in a free alternative weekly. A year after that, I cut a deal with a beloved independent publisher for a comic book of my very own. When I finally held it in my hands, twenty-four pages, color cover, I lifted it to my face and inhaled. I caught the attention of agents and editors, and a couple of big-name cartoonists, who championed my work, and the thing took on a life of its own.

      All of a sudden I’m cool, phone’s ringing, there are lines at my tables at conventions. My cross-hatching improved; my brushwork became fearless. I put out two issues a year. The comic grew to thirty-two pages, then forty-eight.

      TV and film people started calling. I quit my job and helped write a pilot. I flew to Brussels to be on a panel of cartoonists. I designed a book cover for a reissue of On the Road, did a CD jacket for a legendary L.A. punk band. I lived on food stamps, even as my ego ballooned. I broke into magazines, and caved to the occasional job for hire, and torched my savings, and somehow got by.

      But in my own comics, I handled the hot material of my life. My characters were shacking up, doing PR for the Mafia, suffering premarital anxieties and fertility issues. My publisher suggested collecting these comics into a book. The book held together like a novel. It came out six years ago.

      They couldn’t sell the TV pilot. The book went out of print. I couldn’t tell stories about myself anymore. I’d flip through my sketchbook, dating back to before Kaya was born, life drawings, junked panels, false starts, art ideas, rambling journal entries, then babies in diapers and crawling and wobbling, and all this tearstained agonized writing about how tired I was. Then I’d start to think about What I’m Capable Of, but then I’d think, Who cares. Fuck comics. I couldn’t write about these scenes of domestic bliss, maybe because they lacked the reckless, boozy, unzipped struggle of my youth, or maybe because my wife and kids were some creepy experiment I couldn’t relate to, or maybe because they were the most precious thing on earth and needed my protection from the diminishing power of my “art,” and writing about them was evil.

      In my stories I’d been some kind of wild man, some bumbling lothario wielding his incompetence, mistaking his sister-in-law for a prostitute, knocking over the casket at the funeral of his boss, battling suburban angst and sexual constraint in a fictionalized autobio psychodrama. My success at selling that renegade message opened up a sustainable commercial existence, the very existence I’d been trying to avoid. Instead, I embraced conformity, routine, homeownership, marriage, and parenthood, in exchange for neighborly niceties and a sleepy, toothless rebellion in the pages of a crusty political magazine trying to be hip. I worked as an illustrator now, or what might be referred to as an “editorial cartoonist.” I’d also done other types of unclassifiable commercial whore work, promotional posters for a Swedish reggae festival, fabric patterns for a hip-hop clothing company. I had a handful of regular clients from over the years, a hotel soap manufacturer, a Canadian HMO, a fried chicken chain in the Philippines whose in-house art department called when they got totally overwhelmed, although it had been a while, actually, since I’d done any of that crap.

      Magazine work asked less of me, and paid more, and at times could almost be fun. I’d done drawings of Anthony Weiner, the Arab Spring, bedbugs, the uprising in Syria, Walmart slaves, Obama as a jug-eared mullah, Obama in his Bermuda shorts in the Rose Garden burying tiny flag-draped coffins, the whole clown car of Republican kooks who’d been rolling across the country all year—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt, Rick Perry, and several of Mitt. In one he’s waving from his yacht, and in another he’s wiping his ass with an American worker, and in yet another he’s burying his loot in the Caymans. I’d also done full-page drawings for longer features, assigned by Adam, my art director: Somali pirates, Gitmo prisoners force-fed on a hunger strike, and a dozen covers—“The CIA in Damascus,” “Stop Eating So Much Meat,” “The Breast Issue,” “Our Complicated Relationship with Drones.” I could make a living if I worked fast, on three things at once, and didn’t mind the art department yanking my chain.