Every month, Dark Horse Comics gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a comic or book in the Horsepower column which appears in each of our printed comics issues for the month. These articles can include the inspiration behind a specific title, what it’s like to work in the comics industry, or some other special feature on the highlighted title of the month. In this month’s Horsepower, Evan Dorkin gives readers a look into his newest collection, Nerd Inferno: The Essential Evan Dorkin:
I grew up wanting to be in show business. I was a product of pop culture, raised by television, movies, comic books, and monster magazines. I was a class artist who dreamed of being a cartoonist and a class clown who dreamed of being a stand-up comedian. Stage fright got in the way of my ever doing stand-up, so I sat my a** down and tried my hand at doing humor comics.
Unfortunately, the problem with humor is that not everyone finds it funny. Humor is subjective and all that crap. No matter how hard a humorist, comedian, or cartoonist might try, half the audience is going to reject the work offhand. Nothing fails quite as immediately or spectacularly as comedy, whether it’s a dead audience, a comments section full of derision, or a few thousand tattered copies of a comic moldering unloved in dusty dollar boxes. You can’t please everyone. This is especially true when you’re trying to get them to laugh.
Everyone’s suspicious of a comedian. If I say my friend Jack’s a truck driver, no one asks if he can drive. But if Jack also does stand-up, well, that’s different. Is he funny? Well, he’s probably not funny. We’ve all been burned by comedians before, especially the ones that drive trucks. Am I funny? I have no g******** idea. I’ve never once in my life ever said that I’m funny. If I have to defend myself, I’ll tell people that I wrote for Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Yo Gabba Gabba!, that I was a MAD Magazine contributor for ten years, and I made a pilot cartoon for Adult Swim based on The Eltingville Club. And I got all those jobs because of the comics in Nerd Inferno. Does that make me an officially funny person? How the h*** should I know? Stop looking at me like that. I’m just trying to sell a book here.
Nerd Inferno brings together three of my supposedly funny comic collections. Milk & Cheese: Dairy Products Gone Bad is about a carton of milk and a wedge of cheese that wreak havoc on society. I first drew them on a napkin while drunk and waiting for food after a ska show at CBGB. Take that for what you will. The Eltingville Club is a love letter wrapped in a pipe bomb about pop culture and the worst people who worship it. Dork is everything but the kitchen sink (who wants to draw a kitchen sink?), work culled from comics anthologies, punk zines, and mainstream magazines, featuring The Murder Family, Myron the Living Voodoo Doll, The Devil Puppet, autobio stories (how I got beaten up as a kid, my first emotional breakdown, that time I drank ants in summer camp) and several hundred four-panel gags.
There’s over six hundred pages of comics in Nerd Inferno. There’s got to be something in there you’ll find funny. I can’t completely suck over that many pages and still have a career, can I? Because that would be pretty hilarious.
—Evan Dorkin
Nerd Inferno: The Essential Evan Dorkin, written and illustrated by Evan Dorkin, is now available wherever books are sold!
