Profile of Minnesota cartoonist: Zak Sally

By Britt



ZAK SALLY
Zak Sally leases a studio space
in Northeast Minneapolis. The space locates in a sprawling complex of drafty
rooms and uneven floors that several decades before housed packing crates and
rumbled, you can imagine, with the traffic of forklifts and brawny men shouting
orders. The building is an old warehouse re-constituted as artist studios and
commercial space, a sign of changing times in this part of the city where
blue-collar manufacturing has gentrified to bohemian industry: illustration and
animation firms, art crawls and exhibition openings.
Sally has selected a basement
studio, not for the moody lighting afforded by half-size windows or the
background ambiance of furnaces, but for the solidity of the concrete floor. He
owns a 50-year-old printing press that might crash through less stable
flooring. Aside from being a cartoonist, Sally is also a publisher, the founder
of La Mano, which has published three volumes of Sally's own Recidivist series and a collection by
John Porcellino, creator of King-Cat
Comics, called Diary of a Mosquito
Abatement Man.
As he sits as his desk, Sally,
in his late-thirties, slim, bespectacled, flips on a lamp that throws a circle
of light around him and not much else. Behind him, a smaller room radiates a
chalky glow; this is the art room. This is where Sally hangs his work in
progress, page after page detailing the maunderings of Sammy the Mouse and his
cohorts in binge drinking, H.G. Feekes and Puppy. Feekes is a duck; Puppy is a
puppy.
"Sammy the Mouse is probably the only comic I've done since I was
fourteen that's meant to be enjoyed," says Sally, who is the first to call
his previous series, Recidivist,
"serious." A recidivist, by definition, is someone who chronically
relapses, typically to a life of crime. You don't come away from Recidivist with warm fuzzies. The
detailed panels aggregate into short stories that reveal an artist testing the language
of comics—panel transitions, scene changes, angles, shots, the interplay of
word and image—and its ability to communicate impressions and feelings.
In one story, a surgeon and team
of nurses labor over the body of a patient who has evidently misspent his life
in substance abuse and hard living. "If this were an innocent
animal," says the surgeon, "I would shed a tear and then put a bullet
in its head." The surgeon storms out, unwilling to squander his talents on
a lost cause. The head nurse takes over. She too must feel the hopelessness of
patching up the recidivist, someone who as soon as he's released will hit the
corner liquor store. Yet, she persists and discovers, tucked inside the man's
internal organs, a note. The note is from the unconscious patient. It begs
her," Please don't let me die."
Serious stuff.
"I'd worked myself into
this lifelong pursuit of comics as a serious medium and as a serious means of
expression," recounts Sally. "With the third issue of Recidivist, I felt I'd gotten myself
into a corner. I wanted to do a different kind of comic."
Sally sat down to figure out
what comics were good at. He decided they were at their best when telling
stories, like cowboys around a campfire, or coeds in the student union telling
tales about last weekend. Sammy the Mouse,
the first volume of which was published by Fantagraphics in 2007, is
100-percent pure storytelling, no preservatives added. "Sammy is a talk-driven story that's
practically slapstick," says the artist. Slapstick dosed with hallucinogens.
Sammy and friends exist in a
world that is strangely subterranean. Bare bulbs suspend over crooked walks,
which are themselves flanked by crooked buildings that cant drunkenly into
streets. A giant beer bottle houses a liquor store and a giant baby a bar.
Inside the bar, a spinal column rises from the center of a circular counter.
Ribs curve the walls. Sammy, Puppy and Feekes stumble through this surreal
world, driven on by Feekes's desire to get drunk.
The idea for Sammy came to Sally a decade ago
"when I was drunk," says the cartoonist. That was during Sally's days
as a bassist for the band Low, which among other notable undertakings supported
the Brit rock band Radiohead on their world tour. Low originated from Duluth,
Minnesota, as did Sally, who was born there in 1971.
"My grandparents have these
16-millimeter films. There's this film of my sister's fifth birthday party. So,
I was three then. My sister opens her presents and gets these comic books. She
puts them aside, and it was really creepy," says Sally, watching a younger
version of himself from a remove of thirty years, "because all of a sudden
I'm like—you can just see I can't pay attention to anyone at the party anymore.
I'm looking at these comics."
When still a boy, Sally and his
family moved to Bethesda, Maryland. He spent hours at the local comics store,
Big Planet Comics. "They had a back area for the dirty comics but also
those comics that didn't make sense with everything else," says Sally,
referring to the alternative comics being produced by people like Robert Crumb
and Harvey Pekar. "So, basically, if you went in the back area, you were
like a porn hound or something."
A teenager and a cartoonist,
Sally had heard about the Los Angeles brothers Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez,
whose series Love and Rockets,
published by Fantagraphics, had revolutionized alternative comics. But the
Hernandez brothers were in the back area, and Sally was a teenager. The guy at
the counter knew him, knew he loved comics, so let him in the back area. Sally
plucked up issue 21 of Love and Rockets
and the first issue of Yummy Fer by
Chester NAME.
Reading them, says Sally,
"was like going to your first punk show. Everything I'd read before that
was decimated."
After quitting the band Low,
Sally settled in Minneapolis and devoted himself to cartooning. He
self-published Recidivist, then
published Sammy the Mouse, volumes
one and two, through the same publisher that had introduced him to the
Hernandez brothers, Fantagraphics. If Sally needed further evidence his life
had come full circle, in 2008, he was asked to interview Jaime Hernandez for
the annual Rain Taxi Festival of Books in Minneapolis.
###

Writer

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