TALKING MOTHERS & ELEPHANTS WITH PAUL HORNSCHEMEIER

[MattBrady]

by Daniel Robert Epstein

Not since Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth has there book as satisfying and depressing as Paul Hornschemeier’s Mother, Come Home.

It’s written through the eyes of a son who is struggling with his father, by varying degrees of escapism and fantasy, to come to terms with the death of the family's mother – and the slow slipping away of the father who is completely unequipped to deal with the loss of his wife.

The power of Mother, Come Home creeps into you. At first the story pulls you one way but then when the truth is revealed you are blown away. But like all great comics it’s not just the story that draws you to it -it's Hornschemeier’s beautiful and clean artwork. The chapters alternate between reality and fantasy so seamlessly that the sadness that flows off the work melts right into your brain.

Newsarama: How are you doing today?

Paul Hornschemeier: Tired as usual. But that’s what happens when you go to sleep at 4 in the morning.

NRAMA: Why do you go to sleep so late? Are you one of the night owl creators?

PH: I tend to work from 10 a.m. until 4 the following morning.

NRAMA: How autobiographical is Mother, Come Home?

PH: It’s fairly autobiographical. I would say that more than anything it’s biographical. It’s more about my father, my grandfather and the events, which happened in their lives. Some of the emotions and situations that result from relationships in the book are autobiographical but as far as the actual physical events, they are more lifted from other people’s lives.

NRAMA: So the son isn’t you?

PH: The way that the son interacts with the father is certainly similar to the relationship I had with my father. The son happened to look very much like I looked when I was kid and the father looks like my father. But the actual events are more closely tied to my father’s life even though those aren’t a literal translation.

NRAMA: I read that a teacher of yours had a breakdown in front of the class you were in and that made you start on this story.

PH: Yes, it was a symbolic logic professor with the last name of Tennant. He and his wife had gone on safari recently so she had taken preventative malaria medication, had a very adverse reaction to it and was on her deathbed. This was something that was obviously out of this teacher’s control and he proceeded to lose it in the middle of class one day. He was cursing and slamming his fists. It made a pretty deep impression on me.

NRAMA: When the father in the book is at the institution slamming his fists down, was that taken from what you saw?

PH: Yes, though obviously it was a different setting. This person is in an institutionalized situation and is supposed to act rationally and take everything in stride and be logical. But there was a lot more brewing underneath which exploded at one point.

NRAMA: When you saw this teacher breakdown in front of you, how did you relate that to your own life?

PH: It certainly made a large impression on me and I certainly remember writing about it at the time. But it wasn’t something that I felt all that much in my life. I was very secure where I was at the time and, within the confines of my mind, I was in a fairly decent relationship. But fortunately the girl I was dating woke up and figured out that I was insane. She ended up leaving me, much to her benefit, and that made me look at a lot of things in my life. We were actually engaged to be married.

NRAMA: Wow.

PH: Yeah, so I had a lot of loss issues that were going on so that brought back up this situation with the teacher. At some point I went home to visit my parents and I was thinking, “One of my parents is going to die before the other. One of them is going to have to live without this staple of their everyday life.” While it seems pretty simplistic and should be obvious, it kind of came as a shocking realization that these people were not going to die simultaneously. There will be this strange vacuum in which the other person is going to have to exist.

At that point I brought back up the teacher and was looking at it and understanding more of what he was experiencing. My life was sort of all figured out and everything I was doing was set. Then I was presented with something that was totally out of control and there is nothing I could do.

NRAMA: How did that relate to your father and grandfather? Did your grandfather recently pass?

PH: There is a lot of stuff I’m not going to talk about specifically just out of respect for my family. But a lot of it was things my father had told me when I was young. The scene with the son and the father in the woods is probably the most autobiographical scene in the book.

NRAMA: What brought you to doing this specific story?

PH: I had finished Forlorn Funnies #1 and was starting to do #2. There was another story I was going to start called A New Decade for Eli Guggenheim, which is the next long story I will be working on. But at that point it wasn’t developed enough and I didn’t feel it was at a good enough stage to put into final production. I had this story, Mother, Come Home, that I was going to do as a screenplay so I decided I would take that and adapt it as a comic book.

NRAMA: Did you have an agent that was going to submit the screenplay?

PH: [laughs] No, I’ve just really been interested in film for a long time and it was the first screenplay type thing I was working on. Ultimately I think it works far better as a comic. There were a lot of things that I would have been done extremely differently if it had been a film.

NRAMA: Like what?

PH: A lot of the pluralistic realities that are going on in the story, these fantasy worlds combined with realistic worlds. While I do think you could do that in film, it would be hard to do it without becoming incredibly hokey, whereas in the book it’s only somewhat hokey.

NRAMA: You can do anything in comics.

PH: Yes, and there are no budgetary concerns. I was writing the screenplay with the intention that it would be something I would make. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do all the computer-generated things that would have been required for the fantasy aspects. It’s probably better for everyone involved that I did it as a comic.

NRAMA: In the story, the boy wears a lion mask at key points. What significance does it play?

PH: Well, the aesthetics of Mother, Come Home rose out of an image that came into my head. It was this small blond haired boy walking along a snow-covered horizon wearing a lion mask and a red cape. I happened to find the exact mask I was thinking of in a children’s costume store in England. I had probably seen that mask when I was younger somewhere. I remember when I was a child that there was a store we passed a lot when we were driving to the theater. But also I was very fond of masks because my birthday is very close to Halloween.

NRAMA: Do you feel you could do what the father did in the story?

PH: I have certainly been in the same places as the father. That’s sort of where the father character comes from. He makes decisions that I don’t feel would be decisions that I would make or hope that I wouldn’t make. These are certainly things I have thought about and I think it’s definitely something that people in those situations do think about. That was a major thing I wanted to deal with in the story, these very destructive thought patterns. I didn’t want to walk away from that and make it this candy-coated thing about loss and how people deal with it. There are brutal, horrible things that people go through and often, on the face of it, it may not make much sense. People are looking for reasons but those reasons are difficult to capture because the loss is so great. So they deal with it in ways that may not make sense in the confines of logic and reality, more specifically in the confines of our – the people outside these thought patterns - logic and reality.

NRAMA: While many critics have expressed how gut-wreching it is to read, how difficult was it to create this story?

PH: It was interesting because it was the first long form story I’ve done. But formal joys aside, it was very difficult. It wasn’t something that I would wake up in the morning and go “Oh boy, I get to work on Mother, Come Home.” There were times where I would much rather go outside or get some lunch rather than have to sit down and have to draw certain scenes. It was not a fun thing and I don’t think I will be doing another story like that for quite some time [laughs].

NRAMA: How did it end up at Dark Horse Comics?

PH: It was kind of a strange turn of events. [Dark Horse Senior Editor] Diana Schutz purchased a book I did called Stand on a Mountain, Look Back and then contacted me completely out of the blue just to let me know that they were plugging it in Grendel number 3078 or whatever. I thought that was really strange but as a way of thanking her I sent her a bunch of books and one of them was Forlorn Funnies #2. She wrote me back and asked me about a story it contained, namely Mother, Come Home. It just went from there and worked out very beneficially for me. Around the time things were getting finalized with Dark Horse there were other offers but at that point because Diana was so enthusiastic it seemed like a good fit.

NRAMA: This is not the kind of book that Dark Horse seems to publish as much anymore. How has it been working with them?

PH: I’ve been completely happy with everything they’ve done. Diana must never sleep and must add on another week for every week that normal humans live. She seems to do every thing she can for the book. It is strange because of course Dark Horse publishes things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Wars but that’s great. I just wish that Marvel and DC would take risks like this. While Dark Horse does publish mainstream stuff they also do things like Concrete and things like that.

NRAMA: How much computer work did you do for the book?

PH: Everything as far as the line art is produced in the real world with non-photo blue pencil, brush and ink. The only thing that’s done on the computer is the coloring.

NRAMA: And you did that?

PH: Yes.

NRAMA: What significance did you try to bring to the book with the way it’s designed?

PH: The main thing I wanted was to give it the aesthetic of something like a Penguin Classics, which Diana completely understood. I wanted someone in a store to pick it up and not have a clue that it was something that had a ton of pictures on the inside. The whole thing is supposed to conceptually be a memoir of the main character Thomas Tennant who seems to not be a comic book author but a literary person. That was the big thing with the aesthetic. There are some old JD Salinger books that I was looking at as far as typesetting.

NRAMA: How did Entertainment Weekly’s mention help the book?

PH: Other than friends and family contacting me about it I didn’t see anything, but I’m so far removed from the sales aspect of it. The book is sold out and going back to print, so that’s good. Beyond that I don’t know. I’m sure it wasn’t a bad thing [laughs].

NRAMA: Are all your previous works as melancholy as this work?

PH: My really early work was all teetering between surreal and out and out comedy. As I was going my stuff got more depressing, lonely and desperate. I think that’s just the natural byproduct of sitting alone at your desk hour after hour. The old series I used to do, Sequential, was much more fun, exciting and experimental. But like I said I won’t be doing a whole lot more stories like Mother, Come Home and I will now be moving onto to other emotions.

NRAMA: Speaking of that, your next story is going to be called Return of the Elephant.

PH: Yes that will be coming out in July from AdHouse Books and I think that will surprise people because it’s different from Mother, Come Home in every possible way. Then towards the end of this year there will be a large collection of my old work that AdHouse Books will also be putting out.

NRAMA: What will you be doing with Dark Horse next?

PH: A New Decade for Eli Guggenheim will come out in late 2005 from Dark Horse and my series, Forlorn Funnies, will start being published by Fantagraphics in summer of 2005.

NRAMA: Where did you grow up?

PH: I was born in Cincinnati and grew up in Georgetown Ohio, which is a small farming town. It’s only claim to fame is that it’s the boyhood home of Ulysses S. Grant. That’s all they’ve got.

NRAMA: What comics do you read now?

PH: I read the staples of independent comics like Acme Novelty Library and I would say that Eightball is my favorite comic being produced. I also love Chester Brown. I think Louis Riel is amazing. And I’m really interested in Eiland [by Dutch cartoonists Stefan JH van Dinther & Tobias Tycho Schalken]. They are two the best formalists in comics today. They make me want to quit working and just read their stuff.

NRAMA: I found an old article you wrote five years ago about Peanuts. Are you a big fan?

PH: Oh yes I am certainly a big Charles Schulz fan. It’s hard to be a cartoonist and not admire his work.

NRAMA: Did you read a lot of comics when you were younger?

PH: I really didn’t. Aquaman was probably my favorite for some reason I can’t figure out. I would draw little pictures from comics. I should give credit to Jim Aparo and Steve Ditko because they were probably the biggest influence on me when I was 13.

Where I was growing up the nearest comic shop or any shop was probably a good hour and 15 minute drive, so the first comic that I got was an ALL Detergent Spider-Man comic and that was from my dentist. It had the secret origins and was great because it had all these breakdowns of his abilities comparing his strength to the Hulk and Thor. I still have that comic and at some point I need to do a parody of it because it thoroughly affected the way I read and enjoy comics.

Check out Dark Horse’s website for Mother, Come Home here, and Hornschemeier’s own site here.

[ADD]

I'm thrilled to see Forlorn Funnies will be published by Fantagraphics. Eric Reynolds is the best publicist in the industry (possibly the universe) and has what it takes to get Paul's work into the hands of as many readers as possible.

Looking forward to all Paul's upcoming projects, especially the collected Sequential, which should be a real treat, as many of those stories are long, long out-of-print.

ADD

[amazingdavidman]

Mother Come Home and Return of the Elephant. Looks like I have two new books I have to pick up. I really I liked the speach baloon through the ear--never seen that anywhere before. Nice stuff.

[ADD]

You should also seek out the first and fifth issues of Forlorn Funnies (not collected in Mother, Come Home, and excellent comics in themselves) and the last issue of Sequential, Stand on a Mountain, Look Back, which I think is available on Amazon.com.

Just sayin'.

ADD

[render man]

I still have all Paul's early Sequential issues, and am not surprised he is having the success he is having. When he was doing things small press, you just knew he was gonna break out one day. Good for him.

[Scott Wherle]

Mother, Come Home is an absolute masterpiece that should be held in the same regard as Craig Thompson's Blankets. Simply a beautiful, moving and emotionally draining piece of work.

In an industry where everyone's trying to up the next with their "shock" endings, MCH delivers one relies less in hype and more on good storytelling.

Pick it up. You won't be disappointed.

[Nerby727]

I love, and I mean love, Mother, Come Home. I read about it in Entertainment Weekly and decided to pick it up. When I did and sat down and read it, I was just blown away. I'm really looking forward to his future work. It was just fantastic.